Steven Frisson

University of Birmingham · School of Psychology

Readers extract orthographic and semantic information from parafoveal words before fixating on them. While this has to be achieved within an intersaccadic interval, the neuronal mechanisms supporting this fast parafoveal word processing within the language network remain unknown. We co-registered MEG and eye-tracking data in a natural reading parad...

Readers extract orthographic and semantic information from parafoveal words before fixating on them. While this has to be achieved within an intersaccadic interval, the neuronal mechanisms supporting this fast parafoveal word processing within the language network remain unknown. We co-registered MEG and eye-tracking data in a natural reading parad...

Humans can read and comprehend text rapidly, implying that readers might process multiple words per fixation. However, the extent to which parafoveal words are previewed and integrated into the evolving sentence context remains disputed. We investigated parafoveal processing during natural reading by recording brain activity and eye movements using...

Humans can read and comprehend text rapidly, implying that readers might process multiple words per fixation. However, the extent to which parafoveal words are previewed and integrated into the evolving sentence context remains disputed. We investigated parafoveal processing during natural reading by recording brain activity and eye movements using...

Humans can read and comprehend text rapidly, implying that readers might process multiple words per fixation. However, the extent to which parafoveal words are previewed and integrated into the evolving sentence context remains disputed. We investigated parafoveal processing during natural reading by recording brain activity and eye movements using...

Humans can read and comprehend text rapidly, implying that readers might process multiple words per fixation. However, the extent to which parafoveal words are previewed and integrated into the evolving sentence context remains disputed. We investigated parafoveal processing during natural reading by recording brain activity and eye movements using...

Humans can read and comprehend text rapidly, implying that readers might process multiple words per fixation. However, the extent to which parafoveal words are previewed and integrated into the evolving sentence context remains disputed. We investigated parafoveal processing during natural reading by recording brain activity and eye movements using...

We saccade 3 to 5 times per second when reading. However, little is known about the neuronal mechanisms coordinating the oculomotor and visual systems during such rapid processing. Here, we ask if brain oscillations play a role in the temporal coordination of the visuomotor integration. We simultaneously acquired MEG and eye-tracking data while par...

Sentence reading involves constant competition between lexical candidates. Previous research with monolinguals has shown that the neighbours of a read word are inhibited, making their retrieval as a subsequent target more difficult, but the duration of this interference may depend on reading skills. In this study, we examined neighbour priming effe...

While humans have a remarkable ability to read and comprehend text, the neuronal mechanisms supporting natural reading remain elusive. It is debated whether upcoming words in the parafovea are processed semantically. Here we show that the brain can indeed detect that a word is contextually implausible even before fixating on it. We demonstrated thi...

Perfetti (2007) proposed that the quality of lexical representations affects reading. We investigated the role of lexical quality in decoding. Eighty-four adults read aloud words and pseudowords with dense and sparse neighbourhoods in a masked form-priming experiment. Individual-difference measures of language and cognitive processes were collected...

We saccade three to five times per second when reading. However, little is known about the neuronal mechanisms coordinating the oculomotor and visual system during such rapid processing. Here we ask if brain oscillations play a role in the temporal coordination of the visuomotor integration. We simultaneously acquired MEG and eye-tracking data whil...

Sentences can be enriched by considering what the speaker does not say but could have done, the alternative. We conducted two experiments to test whether the salience of the alternative contributes to how people derive implicatures. Participants responded true or false to underinformative categorical sentences that involved quantifiers. Target sent...

In spite of the reduced visual acuity, parafoveal information plays an important role in natural reading. However, competing models on reading disagree on whether words are previewed parafoveally at the lexical level. We find neural evidence for lexical parafoveal processing by combining a rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT) approach with magn...

According to the lexical quality hypothesis (Perfetti, 2007), differences in the orthographic, semantic, and phonological representations of words will affect individual reading performance. Whilst several studies have focused on orthographic precision and semantic coherence, few have considered phonological precision. The present study used a suit...

Humans have a remarkable ability to efficiently explore visual scenes and text using eye movements. Humans typically make eye movements (saccades) every ~250 ms. Since saccade initiation and execution take 100 ms, this leaves only ~150 ms to recognize the fixated object (or word) while simultaneously previewing candidates for the next saccade goal....

Classification within the sport of vision impairment (VI) shooting is based upon the athlete’s visual function. This study aimed to determine whether more than one class of competition is needed within VI shooting on the basis of visual field loss. Qualification scores of 23 elite athletes were obtained at World Championship events in prone and sta...

Humans have a remarkable ability to efficiently explore visual scenes and text by means of eye-movements. Humans typically make eye-movements (saccades) every ~250ms. Since the saccadic motor planning and execution takes 100ms this leaves only ~150ms to recognize the fixated object (or word), while simultaneously previewing candidates for the next...

While reading is an essential human skill, the neuronal mechanisms supporting proficient reading are not well understood. In spite of the reduced visual acuity, parafoveal information plays a critical role in natural reading. However, it is debated whether words are previewed parafoveally at the lexical level. This is a key dispute for competing mo...

This study assessed the prevalence of childhood stuttering in adults with dyslexia (AWD) and the prevalence of dyslexia in adults who stutter (AWS). In addition, the linguistic profiles of 50 AWD, 30 AWS and 84 neurotypical adults were measured. We found that 17 out of 50 AWD (34%) reported stuttering during childhood compared to 1% of the neurotyp...

While reading is an essential human skill, many of the neuronal mechanisms supporting reading are not well understood. In spite of the reduced visual acuity, parafoveal information plays a critical role in natural reading ¹ ; however, it is strongly debated whether words are previewed parafoveally at the lexical level 2–9 . This is a key dispute fo...

The lexical quality hypothesis (Perfetti, 2007) argues that variation in the quality of lexical representations will affect individual reading performance. Whilst several studies have focused on reading comprehension, few have considered the role of lexical quality in decoding. Two experiments investigated individual differences in the neighbourhoo...

Previous research has shown that early-acquired words are produced faster than late-acquired words. Juhasz and colleagues (Juhasz, Lai & Woodcock, Behavior Research Methods, 47 (4), 1004-1019, 2015; Juhasz, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-10, 2018) argue that the Age-of-Acquisition (AoA) loci for complex words, specifically comp...

The influential hypothesis by Markus & Kitayama (Markus, Kitayama 1991. Psychol. Rev. 98, 224) postulates that individuals from interdependent cultures place others above self in interpersonal contexts. This led to the prediction and finding that individuals from interdependent cultures are less egocentric than those from independent cultures (Wu,...

Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental condition which manifests itself in the form of reading difficulties, while stuttering is a neurodevelopmental condition that involves speech difficulties. At face value, these conditions are distinct from one another, however both conditions have been found to share common atypical genes and behaviours. We carried...

Two experiments investigated whether listeners mandatorily apply the Gricean maxim of quantity. In conversation, it is infelicitous to use a label that does not distinguish the referent (“the car” when there are two cars) or to use an unnecessarily specific label (“the convertible” when only one car is present). Subjects verified labels that picked...

This study investigated individual differences in the neighbourhood density effect observed during the processing of written words. A masked priming experiment measured form priming for word and pseudoword targets from dense and sparse neighbourhoods in 84 university students. In addition, individual difference measures of language and cognitive pr...

We characterized cognitive function in two metabolic diseases. MPS–IVa (mucopolysaccharidosis IVa, Morquio) and tyrosinemia type III individuals were assessed using tasks of attention, language and oculomotor function. MPS–IVa individuals were slower in visual search, but the display size effects were normal, and slowing was not due to long reactio...

Niemann-Pick type C (NP-C) is a rare recessive disorder associated with progressive supranuclear gaze palsy. Degeneration occurs initially for vertical saccades and later for horizontal saccades. There are studies of oculomotor degeneration in adult NP-C patients [1, 2] but no comparable studies in children. We used high-resolution video-based eye...

Two eye movement while reading experiments address the issue of how reading of an unpredictable word is influenced by the presence of a more predictable alternative. The experiments replicate the robust effects of predictability on the probability of skipping and on early and late reading time measures. However, in both experiments, an unpredictabl...

Two eye movement while reading experiments address the issue of how reading of an unpredictable word is influenced by the presence of a more predictable alternative. The experiments replicate the robust effects of predictability on the probability of skipping and on early and late reading time measures. However, in both experiments, an unpredictabl...

The conclusion of our present and past research is that homophonic forms of regularly inflected verbs have their own orthographic representations in the mental lexicon and that these representations cause interference in writing (spelling errors), whereas they might cause facilitation in reading (a claim made by dual-route models of reading).

Metonymic words have multiple related meanings, such as college, as in the building ("John walked into the college") or the educational institution ("John was promoted by the college"). Most researchers have found support for direct access models of metonymy but one recent study, Lowder and Gordon (2013), found delayed reading times for metonymic s...

There are competing views on the on-line processing of polysemous words such as book, which have distinct but semantically related senses (as in bound book vs. scary book). According to a Sense-Enumeration Lexicon (SEL) view, different senses are represented separately, just as the different meanings of a homonym (e.g. bank). According to an unders...

We investigated how orthographic and phonological information is activated during reading, using a fast priming task, and during single word recognition, using masked priming. Specifically, different types of overlap between prime and target were contrasted: high orthographic and high phonological overlap (track-crack), high orthographic and low ph...

The present study investigated whether Short Message Service shortcuts are more difficult to process in sentence context than the spelled-out word equivalent and, if so, how any additional processing difficulty arises. Twenty-four student participants read 37 Short Message Service shortcuts and word equivalents embedded in semantically plausible an...

In an eyetracking study, we examined whether readers use psychological essentialist reasoning and perspective taking online. Stories were presented in which an animal or an artifact was transformed into another animal (e.g., a donkey into a zebra) or artifact (e.g., a plate into a clock). According to psychological essentialism, the essence of the...

When readers need to go beyond the straightforward compositional meaning of a sentence (i.e., when enriched composition is required), costly additional processing is the norm. However, this conclusion is based entirely on research that has looked at enriched composition between two phrases or within the verb phrase (e.g., the verb and its complemen...

It is commonly assumed that when we encounter a word in a text, we automatically and immediately activate specific, detailed semantic information associated with that word and instantly integrate this information in the unfolding interpretation of the text. On-line evidence of how we process polysemous words, that is, words with multiple semantical...

Although natural language appears to be largely compositional, the meanings of certain expressions cannot be straightforwardly recovered from the meanings of their parts. This study examined the online processing of one such class of expressions: concealed questions, in which the meaning of a complex noun phrase (the proof of the theorem) shifts to...

The interpretation generated from a sentence of the form P and Q can often be different to that generated by Q and P, despite the fact that and has a symmetric truth-conditional meaning. We experimentally investigated to what extent this difference in meaning is due to the connective and and to what extent it is due to order of mention of the event...

Experiment 1 examined whether the semantic transparency of an English unspaced compound word affected how long it took to process it in reading. Three types of opaque words were each compared with a matched set of transparent words (i.e. matched on the length and frequency of the constituents and the frequency of the word as a whole). Two sets of t...

An eye-movement study examined the processing of expressions requiring complement coercion (J. Pustejovsky, 1995), in which a noun phrase that does not denote an event (e.g., the book) appears as the complement of an event-selecting verb (e.g., began the book). Previous studies demonstrated that these expressions are more costly to process than are...

We investigated how easy it was for people to understand familiar and novel senses for words by monitoring participants’ eye movements while they read short texts. To do this, we compared the processing of names (e.g., Dickens) where sentential context gave them literal interpretations (e.g., met Dickens) versus metonymic interpretations (e.g., rea...

In principle, comprehenders might always make immediate commitments to the interpretation of expressions (full commitment) or wait until such decisions are necessary (minimal commitment; Frazier & Rayner, 1990). One interesting case involves decisions about telicity: whether expressions refer to events that are determinate versus indeterminate with...

Comprehenders often need to go beyond conventional word senses to obtain an appropriate interpretation of an expression. We report an experiment examining the processing of standard metonymies (The gentleman read Dickens) and logical metonymies (The gentleman began Dickens), contrasting both to the processing of control expressions with a conventio...

In 2 eye-movement experiments, the authors tested whether transitional probability (the statistical likelihood that a word precedes or follows another word) affects reading times and whether this occurs independently from contextual predictability effects. Experiment 1 showed early effects of predictability, replicating S. A. McDonald and R. C. Shi...

We review some of our research findings on verb spelling errors in Dutch. The spelling of Dutch regularly inflected verb forms is governed by rules of the simple concatenative type (stem + suffix). The spelling of a subset of these verb forms is determined by morpheme-based analogy, both at the level of the stem-final letter and at the level of the...

An eye-tracking experiment examined the on-line interpretation of complex expressionslike heavy smoker. Preceding contexts biased the interpretation either towards asubsective (someone who smokes a lot) or an intersective interpretation (a smoker whoweighs a lot). Results indicate that the global context does not completely override localpreference...

An eye-tracking experiment examined the on-line interpretation of complex expressions like heavy smoker. Preceding contexts biased the interpretation either towards a subsective (someone who smokes a lot) or an intersective interpretation (a smoker who weighs a lot). Results indicate that the global context does not completely override local prefer...

s concentrated on the rarer instances of meaning ambiguity, where a word (e.g., bank, coach) has unrelated interpretations (e.g., Swinney, 1979; Rayner & Duffy, 1986). Here, the main focus is on what has traditionally been termed metonymy: Dickens can refer literally to the man or metonymically to his writings, and Vietnam can refer literally to th...

In previous research (Sandra, Frisson, & Daems, 1999) we demonstrated that experienced writers of Dutch (18-year-olds) make spelling errors on regularly inflected homophonic verb forms. Intrusion errors, i.e., spelling of the homophonic alternative, occurred more often when the low-frequency homophone had to be written. In the present article we re...

Based on the results from a number of eye-tracking experiments, Frisson and Pickering (1999) and Pickering and Frisson (2001) proposed a model for the on-line processing of words with semantically related senses. According to this model, only the underspecified, schematic meaning of a word with multiple senses is activated initially. This underspec...

In 2 self-paced reading experiments, we investigate the processing characteristics of unfamiliar metaphorical subject-predicate structures. The literal first hypothesis pre- dicts that processing metaphorical expressions of the type "an x is a y" will proceed more slowly than in the case of literal statements of the same type. This prediction is co...

In 2 eye-tracking experiments, participants read verbs that had 2 (unrelated) meanings or 2 (related) senses in contexts that disambiguated before or after the verb, to the dominant or subordinate interpretation. A 3rd experiment used unambiguous verbs. The results indicated that the language processor used information about context in the early st...

The authors investigated the time course of the processing of metonymic expressions in comparison with literal ones in 2 eye-tracking experiments. Experiment 1 considered the processing of sentences containing place-for-institution metonymies such as the convent in That blasphemous woman had to answer to the convent; it was found that such expressi...

Two experiments are reported in which the determinants of spelling errors on homophonous verb forms in Dutch were studied. Both experiments indicated that errors were determined by the frequency relationship between the two homophonous forms and the distance between the verb and the word determining its spelling. We propose an interference model fo...

This article presents two experiments investigating whether language users spontaneously apply semantic extension principles to novel usages, or whether they treat word meanings as discrete, rigidly defined entities. In Experiment 1, readers made a timed decision on the correctness of a sentence. Rejecting a cognitively plausible yet unattested ext...

This article presents two experiments investigating whether language users spontaneously apply semantic extension principles to novel usages, or whether they treat word meanings as discrete, rigidly defined entities. In Experiment I, readers made a timed decision on the correctness of a sentence. Rejecting a cognitively plausible yet unattested ext...

Priming in text reading; Eye-tracking; English In a recent paper, Paterson, Liversedge, and Davis (2009) showed inhibitory priming effects for a word when preceded by a word's orthographic neighbour. For example, "blue" was fixated for longer when "blur" appeared in the immediate prior context compared to when it was preceded by the control word "g...