An official website of the United States government
Eye-tracking corpora have advanced our understanding of reading processes by providing large-scale datasets of naturalistic reading behavior. However, existing corpora have almost exclusively sampled from typically hearing readers of spoken languages. Here, we present the Signers’ Eye-movements in English Reading (SEER) Corpus, a dataset of eye-movement behaviors from 41 skilled deaf adult readers who are early signers of American Sign Language (ASL), as well as a comparative group of 101 typically hearing monolingual English readers. Participants read 200 English sentences presented one at a time. In addition to eye-tracking data, the corpus includes detailed participant information: a standardized measure of reading proficiency, spelling recognition, and nonverbal intelligence for all participants. Information for the deaf participants include ASL comprehension scores, age of ASL acquisition, and phonological awareness scores (for a subset of participants). We report comparative analyses of reading behaviors at both the word level and sentence level. We also examine group differences in the effects of word length, frequency, and surprisal on local measures. The results indicate stronger effects of length and surprisal, but equivalent frequency effects (on content words) for deaf compared to hearing readers. The SEER Corpus offers researchers the opportunity to test hypotheses about reading development and efficiency in bimodal bilinguals who are first language users of ASL and skilled readers of English, supporting broader investigations of visual language processing. The corpus is preregistered and publicly availableat https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/7P4F2 to facilitate replication, cross-study comparisons, and exploration of preliminary hypotheses in this understudied population.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2027
Agreement Errors Disrupt Eye Movements in Reading Only When They Are Detected
Abstract Sentence processing models posit that syntactic processing difficulty contributes to the processing time of each word (e.g., Lewis & Vasishth, 2005). On the other hand, the E-Z Reader 10 model of eye movements in reading (Reichle et al., 2009) proposes that syntactic processing affects eye movements only when integration of an input word fails. We present two eye movement experiments designed to address this tension. Readers were presented with ungrammatical sentences with a singular subject and a plural verb, but with a plural local noun that often induces an illusion of grammaticality, e.g., *The editor of the magazines are reviewing the articles before publication. After each critical sentence was removed from the screen, the reader made a binary acceptability judgment. When readers rejected the ungrammatical critical sentences, there was also pronounced disruption to incremental reading. However, on the majority of trials readers accepted these sentences, and on those trials the eye movement record revealed only a very small increase in reading time compared to corresponding grammatical sentences; critically, this small effect was entirely explained by the difference between conditions in the lexical surprisal of the verb. Thus, as predicted by E-Z Reader 10, an effect of agreement computation above and beyond the effect of surprisal was in evidence only when agreement computation failed, i.e., the sentence was rejected. We discuss implications for models of incremental sentence processing and reading.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2504954
- PAR ID:
- 10707476
- Publisher / Repository:
- MIT Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Open Mind
- Volume:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 2470-2986
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1118 to 1156
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Understanding How Dialect Differences Shape How AAE-Speaking Children Process Sentences in Real-TimeAbstract Dialect differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) impact how children comprehend sentences. However, research on real-time sentence processing has the potential to reveal the underlying causes of these differences. This study used eye tracking, which measures how children interpret linguistic features as a sentence unfolds, and examined how AAE- and MAE-speaking children processed “was” and “were,” a morphology feature produced differently in MAE and AAE. Fifty-nine participants, ages 7;8 to 11;0 years, completed standardized measures of dialect density and receptive vocabulary. In the eye tracking task, participants heard sentences in MAE with either unambiguous (e.g., “Jeremiah”) or ambiguous (e.g., “Carolyn May”), subjects and eye movements were measured to singular (image of one person) or plural referents (image of two people). After the onset of the auxiliary verb, AAE-speaking children were sensitive to “was” and “were” when processing sentences but were less likely than MAE-speaking children to use “was” as a basis for updating initial predictions of plural referents. Among African American children, dialect density was predictive of sensitivity to “was” when processing sentences. Results suggest that linguistic mismatch impacts how contrastive verb morphology is used to update initial interpretations of MAE sentences.more » « less
-
In the process of extracting a meaning from a text, our eyes linger much more on some words than others, and we often reread earlier portions of the text. These disruptions to the reading process are particularly common in syntactically ambiguous sentences. What explains the difficulty presented by these sentences? One prominent hypothesis explains it as a special case of the impact of a word’s predictability (operationalized via surprisal) on the difficulty of processing the word. This contrasts with theories that attribute these disruptions to errors in the structure-building process. Earlier attempts to address this debate have been inconclusive because of small numbers of participants, coarse measurements of the reading process that are ill-suited to disentangling these competing views, and a limited range of surprisal estimates. Here, we conduct a large-scale study ( ) examining eye movements during the reading of syntactically challenging sentences, using 409 types of surprisal estimates from language models with multiple architectures and training settings. We find a stark dissociation: Early effects of syntactic disambiguation are well-approximated by language model surprisal, but syntactic disambiguation incurs a significant additional cost, reflected in an increase in rereading that is not explained by language model surprisal. We conclude that surprisal can capture routine structure-building, but not the cost of detecting or correcting errors in the structure-building process.more » « less
-
Behavioral measures of word-by-word reading time provide experimental evidence to test theories of language processing. A-maze is a recent method for measuring incremental sentence processing that can localize slowdowns related to syntactic ambiguities in individual sentences. We adapted A-maze for use on longer passages and tested it on the Natural Stories corpus. Participants were able to comprehend these longer text passages that they read via the Maze task. Moreover, the Maze task yielded useable reaction time data with word predictability effects that were linearly related to surprisal, the same pattern found with other incremental methods. Crucially, Maze reaction times show a tight relationship with properties of the current word, with little spillover of effects from previous words. This superior localization is an advantage of Maze compared with other methods. Overall, we expanded the scope of experimental materials, and thus theoretical questions, that can be studied with the Maze task.more » « less
-
Abstract The detailed study of eye movements in reading has shed considerable light into how language processing unfolds in real time. Yet eye movements in reading remain inadequately studied in non-native (L2) readers, even though much of the world’s population is multilingual. Here we present a detailed analysis of the quantitative functional influences of word length, frequency, and predictability on eye movement measures in reading in a large, linguistically diverse sample of non-native English readers. We find many similar qualitative effects as in L1 readers, but crucially also a proficiency-sensitive “lexicon-context tradeoff”. The most proficient L2 readers’ eye movements approach an L1 pattern, but as L2 proficiency diminishes, readers’ eye movements become less sensitive to a word’s predictability in context and more sensitive to word frequency, which is context-invariant. This tradeoff supports a rational, experience-dependent account of how context-driven expectations are deployed in L2 language processing.more » « less
