Ralph Radach

Ralph Radach
  • Dr. rer. nat.
  • Professor at University of Wuppertal

About

134
Publications
44,775
Reads
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4,624
Citations
Current institution
University of Wuppertal
Current position
  • Professor
Additional affiliations
April 2011 - present
University of Wuppertal
Position
  • Professor
January 2005 - March 2011
Florida State University
Position
  • Professor (Associate)
October 2003 - May 2004
National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Position
  • Professor

Publications

Publications (134)
Article
Full-text available
The present study measured the comprehension-based silent reading efficiency of U.S. students in grades 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12. Students read standardized grade-level passages while an eye movement recording system was used to measure reading rate, fixations (eye stops) per word, fixation durations, and regressions (right-to-left eye movements) per...
Article
Full-text available
The study of eye movements has proven to be one of the most successful approaches in research on reading. In this overview, it is argued that a major reason for this success is that eye movement measurement is not just a methodology-the control of eye movements is actually part and parcel of the dynamics of information processing within the task of...
Article
Full-text available
The preview of a parafoveally visible word conveys benefits when it is subsequently fixated. The current study examined whether these benefits are determined by the effectiveness of parafoveal information extraction, as implied by current models of eye movement control during reading, or by the effectiveness with which extracted information is inte...
Article
Full-text available
This document contains all abstracts of the 22th European Conference on Eye Movements, August 12-29, 2024, in Maynooth, Irland
Poster
Full-text available
We examined how eye movement control during reading can be adjusted to changes in reading speed. Five-sentence paragraphs were presented in grey font, with only one line highlighted in black from top to bottom at a predefined speed. This method allows for good experimental control of speed while preserving nearly natural reading. As a baseline, w...
Article
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Previous research has suggested that some syntactic information such as word class can be processed parafoveally during reading. However, it is still unclear to what extent early syntactic cueing within noun phrases can facilitate word processing during dynamic reading. Two experiments (total N = 72) were designed to address this question using a g...
Preprint
Full-text available
Previous research has suggested that some syntactic information such as word class can be processed parafoveally during reading. However, it is still unclear to what extent early syntactic cueing within noun phrases can facilitate word processing during dynamic reading. Two experiments (total N =72) were designed to address this question using a ga...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives Research on the effects of meditation practice on reading performance is a new and promising field of research. However, the evidence on whether meditation improves reading comprehension and/or speed in continuous reading is inconclusive. The present work addresses this question. Method For the present longitudinal study, undergraduate...
Article
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The pupil responds to a salient stimulus appearing in the environment, in addition to its modulation by global luminance. These pupillary responses can be evoked by visual or auditory stimuli, scaled with stimulus salience, and enhanced by multisensory presentation. In addition, pupil size is modulated by various visual stimulus attributes, such as...
Article
Full-text available
This work represents one of the first attempts to examine the effects of meditation on the processing of written single words. In the present longitudinal study, participants conducted a lexical decision task and rated the affective valence of nouns before and after a 7-week class in mindfulness meditation, loving-kindness meditation, or a control...
Article
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Existing evidence on the effects of glucose supplementation on cognitive performance appears inconclusive. Metabolic switching offers an approach to explain such incoherent findings based on differences in cognitive functioning after fasting. We propose a new construct, cognitive glucose sensitivity (CGS), which quantifies individual performance ga...
Article
Full-text available
While most previous studies of “semantic” priming confound associative and semantic relations, here we use a simple co-occurrence-based approach to examine “pure” semantic priming, while experimentally controlling for associative relations. We define associative relations by the co-occurrence of words in the sentences of a large text corpus. Contex...
Article
Full-text available
Though there is a strong consensus that word length and frequency are the most important single-word features determining visual-orthographic access to the mental lexicon, there is less agreement as how to best capture syntactic and semantic factors. The traditional approach in cognitive reading research assumes that word predictability from senten...
Preprint
Full-text available
Though there is a strong consensus that word length and frequency are the most important single-word features determining visual-orthographic access to the mental lexicon, there is less agreement as how to best capture syntactic and semantic factors. The traditional approach in cognitive reading research assumes that word predictability from senten...
Preprint
Full-text available
The corpus, from which a predictive language model is trained, can be considered the experience of a semantic system. We recorded everyday reading of two participants for two months on a tablet, generating individual corpus samples of 300/500K tokens. Then we trained word2vec models from individual corpora and a 70 million-sentence newspaper corpus...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The corpus, from which a predictive language model is trained, can be considered the experience of a semantic system. We recorded everyday reading of two participants for two months on a tablet, generating individual corpus samples of 300/500K tokens. Then we trained word2vec models from individual corpora and a 70 million-sentence newspaper corpus...
Preprint
Full-text available
While word predictability from sentence context is typically investigated by cloze completion probabilities (CCP), it can be more deeply understood by relying on language models (LMs), allowing to define the three key components of memory: Memory starts with experience as implemented by a text corpus, here defined by Wikipedia capturing general kno...
Article
Full-text available
While word frequency and predictability effects have been examined extensively, any evidence on interactive effects as well as parafoveal influences during whole sentence reading remains inconsistent and elusive. Novel neuroimaging methods utilize eye movement data to account for the hemodynamic responses of very short events such as fixations duri...
Preprint
Full-text available
While word frequency and predictability effects have been examined extensively, any evidence on interactive effects as well as parafoveal influences during whole sentence reading remains inconsistent and elusive. Novel neuroimaging methods utilize eye movement data to account for the hemodynamic responses of very short events such as fixations duri...
Article
Full-text available
There is ample evidence that meditation can regulate emotions. It is questionable, however, whether meditation can down-regulate sensitivity to emotional experience in high-level cognitive representations such as words. The present study shows that adept Zen meditators rated the emotional valence of (low-arousal) positive and (high- and low-arousal...
Preprint
Full-text available
The present study uses a computational approach to examine the role of semantic constraints in normal reading. This methodology avoids confounds inherent in conventional measures of predictability, allowing for theoretically deeper accounts of semantic processing. We start from a definition of associations between words based on the significant log...
Poster
Full-text available
In our talk at the last ECEM, we used n-gram models, topic models, and recurrent neural networks in generalized additive model (GAM) analyses to predict gaze duration data of the Potsdam sentence corpus (Kliegl, Grabner, Rolfs, & Engbert, 2004, European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 16, 262-284). In the present poster, we extend our analyses to...
Poster
Full-text available
There has been little prior research on differences of eye movement control in silent vs. oral reading. Our study is focused on the issue of comprehension monitoring, a continuous (largely automatic) process of checking whether new linguistic input is coherent with prior information. We build on previous work using a two-sentence paradigm in which...
Article
Full-text available
Readers occasionally move their eyes to prior text. We distinguish two types of these movements (regressions). One type consists of relatively large regressions that seek to re-process prior text and to revise represented linguistic content to improve comprehension. The other consists of relatively small regressions that seek to correct inaccurate...
Poster
Full-text available
Disentangling the hemodynamic responses to rapidly paced eye-fixation events is a challenge for Neuroimaging studies of reading. In this study, we utilized the rapid sampling frequency of functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to test whether predictability and frequency of the word right to the fixation leads to retinotopic effects in the l...
Article
Full-text available
To master the task of reading, children need to acquire a coding system representing speech as a sequence of visual symbols. Recent research suggested that performance in the processing of artificial script that relies on the association of sound and symbol may be associated with reading skill. The current longitudinal study examined the predictive...
Article
Full-text available
The Landolt paradigm is a visual scanning task intended to evoke reading-like eye-movements in the absence of orthographic or lexical information, thus allowing the dissociation of (sub-) lexical vs. visual processing. To that end, all letters in real word sentences are exchanged for closed Landolt rings, with 0, 1, or 2 open Landolt rings as targe...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Pure alexia is characterized by effortful left-to-right word processing, leading to a pathological length effect during reading aloud. Results of previous therapy outcome research suggest that patients with pure alexia tend to develop and maintain an adaptive sequential reading strategy in an effort to cope with their severe deficit and...
Article
Full-text available
The goal of this study was to investigate the nature of online comprehension monitoring, its predictors, and its relation to reading comprehension. Questions were concerned with (a) beginning readers’ sensitivity to inconsistencies, (b) predictors of online comprehension monitoring, and (c) the relation of online comprehension monitoring to reading...
Article
Full-text available
The theoretical “difficulty in separating association strength from [semantic] feature overlap” has resulted in inconsistent findings of either the presence or absence of “pure” associative priming in recent literature (Hutchison, 2003, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10(4), p. 787). The present study used co-occurrence statistics of words in senten...
Preprint
Full-text available
The theoretical "difficulty in separating association strength from [semantic] feature overlap" has resulted in inconsistent findings of either the presence or absence of "pure" associative priming in recent literature (Hutchison, 2003, p. 787). The present study used co-occurrence statistics of words in sentences to provide a full factorial manipu...
Article
Full-text available
This document contains all abstracts of the 19th European Conference on Eye Movements, August 20-24, 2017, in Wuppertal, Germany
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The Associative Read-Out Model (AROM) suggests that associations between words can be defined by the log likelihood that they occur together more often in sentences than predicted by their single-word frequency. Moreover, semantic relations can be defined by associative spreading across many common associates. Here, we addressed developmental effec...
Article
Eye movements were measured during the silent reading of sentences to extract several oculomotor measures. Rather than examining each measure independently, oculomotor responses were grouped into two types, the assumption being that the grouping would project onto underlying constructs. Properties of forward-directed movements were assumed to refle...
Article
Full-text available
Computational models of word recognition already successfully used associative spreading from orthographic to semantic levels to account for false memories. But can they also account for semantic effects on event-related potentials in a recognition memory task? To address this question, target words in the present study had either many or few seman...
Conference Paper
Roediger and McDermott (1995) showed that words are falsely recognized, when they provide many associated items in the stimulus set. The Associative Read-Out Model (AROM) is the first interactive model with an implemented semantic layer (Hofmann et al., 2011). It suggests that two words are associated, when they co-occur significantly more often to...
Article
Full-text available
In this study, we investigated fifth graders’ (n = 52) fall literacy, academic language, and motivation and how these skills predicted fall and spring comprehension monitoring on an eye movement task. Comprehension monitoring was defined as the identification and repair of misunderstandings when reading text. In the eye movement task, children read...
Article
Full-text available
Due to their brain damage, aphasic patients with acquired dyslexia often rely to a greater extent on lexical or segmental reading procedures. Thus, therapy intervention is mostly targeted on the more impaired reading strategy. In the present work we introduce a novel therapy approach based on real-time measurement of patients' eye movements as they...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Psycholinguistic error analysis of dyslexic responses in various reading tasks provides the primary basis for clinically discriminating subtypes of pathological reading. Within this framework, phonology-related errors are indicative of a sequential word processing strategy, whereas lexical and semantic errors are associated with a lexic...
Article
Full-text available
We present sentence reading data from a large-scale study with children (N = 632), focusing on three key research questions. (1) What are the trajectories of reading development in oral as compared to silent reading? (2) How are word frequency effects developing and are changes differentially affected by reading mode? (3) Are there systematic diffe...
Article
Full-text available
The Landolt reading paradigm was created in order to dissociate effects of eye movements and attention from lexical, syntactic, and sub-lexical processing. While previous eye-tracking and behavioral findings support the usefulness of the paradigm, it remains to be shown that the paradigm actually relies on the brain networks for occulomotor control...
Article
Full-text available
We examined whether young children acquire orthographic knowledge during structured adult-led storybook reading even though minimal viewing time is devoted to print. Sixty-two kindergarten children were read 12 storybook “chapters” while their eye movements were tracked. Results indicated that the children quickly acquired initial mental graphemic...
Article
Full-text available
Comprehension monitoring is considered a key issue in current debates on ways to improve children' reading comprehension. However, processes and mechanisms underlying this skill are currently not well understood. This article describes one of the first attempts to study comprehension monitoring using eye-tracking methodology. Students in fifth grad...
Presentation
Full-text available
This study measured the comprehension-based silent reading rate (reading rate with comprehension) of U.S. students at Grades 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 with grade-level passages (at both the pre-CCSS and the accelerated CCSS levels) 2011 and compares these performances with data on a 1960 sample (Taylor, 1965). Comprehension-based silent reading rates...
Article
Full-text available
Comprehension monitoring is considered a key issue in current debates on ways to improve children’ reading comprehension. However, processes and mechanisms underlying this skill are currently not well understood. This article describes one of the first attempts to study comprehension monitoring using eye-tracking methodology. Students in fifth grad...
Article
Full-text available
Extracting linguistic information from locations beyond the currently fixated word is a core component of skilled reading. Recent debate on this topic is focused on the question of whether useful linguistic information can be extracted from more than one (parafoveally visible) word to the right of a fixated word (N). The current study examined this...
Article
Full-text available
The study examined whether literal correspondence is necessary for the use of visual features during word recognition and text comprehension. Eye movements were recorded during reading and used to change the colour of dialogue when it was fixated. In symbolically congruent colour conditions, dialogue of female and male characters was shown in orchi...
Article
Full-text available
Zusammenfassung: In den letzten Jahrzehnten hat sich die Messung und Analyse von Blickbewegungen mehr und mehr zur einer Standardmethode für die Untersuchung des Lesens und der Leseentwicklung im Kindesalter entwickelt. Im vorliegenden Artikel werden zunächst einige grundlegende Erkenntnisse zur Dynamik des Lesens aus der Sicht der Blickbewegungsfo...
Article
Full-text available
Previous research on visual and memory search revealed various top down and bottom up factors influencing performance. However, utilising abstract stimuli (e.g. geometrical shapes or letters) and focussing on individual factors has often limited the applicability of research findings. Two experiments were designed to analyse which attributes of a p...
Article
Full-text available
The present study examined the use of statistical cues for word boundaries during Chinese reading. Participants were instructed to read sentences for comprehension with their eye movements being recorded. A two-character target word was embedded in each sentence. The contrast between the probabilities of the ending character (C2) of the target word...
Article
Full-text available
This paper provides a short overview of current issues in research on continuous reading in non-Roman orthographies. At the same time it also serves as an introduction to the present Reading and Writing Special Issue on this topic. The main questions examined in the contributions to this volume are closely related to issues that have been central t...
Article
Full-text available
Although changes in reading performance of recovering letter-by-letter readers have been described in some detail, no prior research has provided an in-depth analysis of the underlying adaptive word processing strategies. Our work examined the reading performance of a letter-by-letter reader, FH, over a period of 15 months, using eye movement metho...
Article
Full-text available
The distance between eye movements and articulation during oral reading, commonly referred to as the eye–voice span, has been a classic issue of experimental reading research since Buswell (1921). To examine the influence of the span on eye movement control, synchronised recordings of eye position and speech production were obtained during fluent o...
Article
Reflexive and voluntary levels of processing have been studied extensively with respect to possible impairments due to alcohol intoxication. This study examined alcohol effects at the 'automated' level of processing essential to many complex visual processing tasks (e.g., reading, visual search) that involve ongoing modifications or reprogramming o...
Article
Full-text available
Parafoveal word processing was examined during Korean reading. Twenty-four native speakers of Korean read sentences in two conditions while their eye movements were being monitored. The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to create a mismatch between characters displayed before and after an eye movement contingent display change. In the first...
Article
Based on recent progress in theory and measurement techniques, the analysis of eye movements has become one of the major methodological tools in experimental reading research. Our work uses this approach to advance the understanding of impaired information processing in acquired central dyslexia of stroke patients with aphasia. Up to now there has...
Article
Full-text available
Cannabis is known to produce substantial acute effects on human cognition and visuomotor skills. Many recent studies additionally revealed rather long-lasting effects on basic oculomotor control, especially after chronic use. However, it is still unknown to what extent these deficits play a role in everyday tasks that strongly rely on an efficient...
Article
Full-text available
The study investigated the eye movements of Thai–English bilinguals when reading both Thai and English with and without interword spaces, in comparison with English monolinguals. Thai is an alphabetic orthography without interword spaces. Participants read sentences with high and low frequency target words embedded in same sentence frames with and...
Article
Full-text available
Eye movements were recorded while participants read declarative sentences. Each sentence contained a critical three-word sequence with a three-letter target word (n), a spatially adjacent post-target word (n+1), and a subsequent nonadjacent post-target word (n+2). The parafoveal previews of words n and n+2 were manipulated so that they were either...
Article
We longitudinally assessed the development of oculomotor control in reading from second to fourth grade by having children read sentences with embedded target words of varying length and frequency. Additionally, participants completed oculomotor (pro-/anti-saccades) and linguistic tasks (word/picture naming), the latter containing the same item mat...
Article
The possibility that during Chinese reading information is extracted at the beginning of the current fixation was examined in this study. Twenty-four participants read for comprehension while their eye movements were being recorded. A pretarget–target two-character word pair was embedded in each sentence and target word visibility was manipulated i...
Article
Full-text available
To investigate the language-specific or language-integrated nature of bilingual lexical processing in different task contexts, we studied how bilinguals process nonwords that differ in their relative resemblance to the bilinguals’ two languages in different versions of the lexical decision task. Unbalanced German-English bilinguals performed a pure...
Article
Full-text available
Although the development of the field of reading has been impressive, there are a number of issues that still require much more attention. One of these concerns the variability of skilled reading within the individual. This paper explores the topic in three ways: (1) it quantifies the extent to which, two factors, the specific reading task (compreh...
Article
Full-text available
Cannabis is known to affect human cognitive and visuomotor skills directly after consumption. Some studies even point to rather long-lasting effects, especially after chronic tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) abuse. However, it is still unknown whether long-term effects on basic visual and oculomotor processing may exist. In the present study, the perform...
Article
Intra-fixation location changes were measured when one-line sentences written in lower or aLtErNaTiNg case were read. Intra-fixation location changes were common and their size was normally distributed except for a relatively high proportion of fixations without a discernible location change. Location changes that did occur were systematically bias...
Article
Full-text available
Alcohol affects a variety of human behaviors, including visual perception and motor control. Although recent research has begun to explore mechanisms that mediate these changes, their exact nature is still not well understood. The present study used two basic oculomotor tasks to examine the effect of alcohol on different levels of visual processing...
Chapter
This chapter reviews and classifies the range of current approaches to the modeling of eye movements during reading, and discusses some of the controversies and important issues arising from the variety of approaches. The chapter focuses on the role and conceptualization of visual attention inherent in the models. It describes how visual attention...
Article
Full-text available
A. Pollatsek, E. D. Reichle, and K. Rayner argue that the critical findings in A. W. Inhoff, B. M. Eiter, and R. Radach are in general agreement with core assumptions of sequential attention shift models if additional assumptions and facts are considered. The current authors critically discuss the hypothesized time line of processing and indicate t...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of the present study was to distinguish between a general deficit in oculomotor control and a deficit restricted to inhibitory functions in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In addition, we were interested in differentiating between a general inhibition deficit and deficient subfunctions of inhibition. We used a...
Article
Abstract: This paper describes some empirical tests of an interactive activation model of eye movement control in reading (the "Glenmore" model). Qualitatively, the Glenmore model can account within one mechanism for preview and spillover effects, regressions, progressions, and refixations. It decouples the decision about when to move the eyes from...
Article
Full-text available
Sequential attention shift models of reading predict that an attended (typically fixated) word must be recognized before useful linguistic information can be obtained from the following (parafoveal) word. These models also predict that linguistic information is obtained from a parafoveal word immediately prior to a saccade toward it. To test these...
Chapter
Readers execute regressions to move the eyes to a previously-read segment of text. Short-range regression and similar size forward directed saccades differ in that interword regressions are neither influenced by word length nor launch site. This chapter proposes that these regressions are controlled by relatively precise representations of word loc...
Article
Full-text available
The temporal dynamics of a visual target word’s phonological representation was examined by presentation of an irrelevant spoken companion word when the participant’s eyes reached the target’s location during sentence reading. The spoken word was identical, similar, or dissimilar to the phonological specification of the visual target. All spoken wo...
Article
Full-text available
The study of eye movements has become a well established and widely used methodology in experimental reading research. This Introduction provides a survey of some key methodological issues, followed by a discussion of major trends in the development of theories and models of eye movement control in fluent reading. Among the issues to be considered...
Article
Full-text available
The present research tested the hypothesis that variations in the orthographic regularity of word beginnings influence landing positions and amplitudes of interword saccades in continuous reading. Participants were asked to read sentences including target words of low, medium, and high frequency of initial quadrigrams that were either single‐root n...
Chapter
Full-text available
Objective: One of the most powerful medications that have very broad aspects of clinical application are the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI). We use SSRI as a first choice agents in treatment of depression, obsessive-compulsive disorders and some anxiety disordes. Objective: To analyze the outcome of treatment of adolescent depresion...
Article
Full-text available
Research on the visual processing of advertisements has so far focused on formal aspects such as the relative size of print or the composition of graphical elements. Little is known, however, about effects of specific content-related design factors. One such factor is the complexity of the pragmatic relation between image and text. We refer to an a...
Article
This chapter describes an interactive activation model of eye movement control in reading, which we refer to as "Glenmore", that can account within one mechanism for preview and spillover effects, and for regressions, progressions, and refixations. The model decouples the decision about when to move the eyes from the word recognition process. The t...

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