Ralph Radach

Bergische Universität Wuppertal | Uni-Wuppertal, BUW ·  Psychologie

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This document contains all abstracts of the 19th European Conference on Eye Movements, August 20-24, 2017, in Wuppertal, Germany

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...