Effects of lexical predictability on parafoveal and foveal processing in reading

阅读是现代社会的基本技能。开发有效的阅读教学方法，以及针对阅读困难和障碍的有效干预措施，需要理解流利阅读所涉及的认知过程。最近的研究表明，熟练的阅读可能会受到我们预测即将出现的单词的能力的帮助。读者利用他们对语言和世界的了解来预测或预测他们可能遇到的单词;正确预测的单词更容易识别。本研究详细调查了这一现象，比较了两种最先进的方法的数据：1）跟踪读者的眼球运动和2）记录事件相关电位（ERP），它反映了大脑对单个单词的反应。这两种方法都显示了响应单词可预测性的可靠变化。一个矛盾的动机，目前的研究是，眼动反映了一个词的可预测性，只有当一个词可以在周边视觉预处理，然后才能直接检查。相比之下，ERP反映了一个词的可预测性，即使没有这样的预处理。通过更好地理解这两种方法告诉我们什么，以及差异效应的来源，研究人员希望进一步了解对即将到来的单词进行无意识预测可以使读者受益的方式。研究人员测试了一个假设，即可预测性通过影响早期的正射处理来影响眼球运动，这是在旁视视觉中进行的，而一个单词不是以最大的视觉敏锐度观看的。这意味着一个贝叶斯帐户的可预测性效果，即基于上下文的先验知识的影响是强有力的，只有当感知证据是相对模糊的。在ERP的可预测性的效果被认为是一个完全不同的影响，后期，整合过程。为了检验这些假设的预测，将进行八个使用边界范式的眼动实验（其中一个词被另一个词取代，直到它被直接注视）。其中三个实验还要求参与者明确地检测从预览到目标的变化，因为假设对这种变化可检测的情况做出了新颖的预测。其中两个实验结合了联合收割机眼动记录和边界范式与同步ERP测量。在这些实验中，可预测性对眼动和ERP的影响预计是完全分离的，其中一个或另一个取决于预览单词和目标单词的性质。最后，E-Z阅读器模型的眼球运动在阅读将被修改，以解释这些影响，以及其他可预测性相关的现象。将开发一个新的公开的E-Z Reader实现，这将允许其他研究人员评估模型的架构并测试模型参数变化的影响。

Reading is an essential skill in modern society. Developing effective methods for teaching reading, and effective interventions for reading difficulties and disabilities, requires an understanding of the cognitive processes involved in fluent reading. Recent research has suggested that skilled reading may be aided by our ability to predict upcoming words. Readers use their knowledge of their language and the world to anticipate or predict the words that they are likely to encounter; words that are correctly predicted are more easily recognized. The present research investigates this phenomenon in detail, comparing data from two state-of-the-art methods: 1) tracking of readers' eye movements and 2) recording of Event-Related Potentials (ERPs), which reflect the brain's activity in response to individual words. Both methods show reliable changes in response to a word's predictability. A paradox that motivates the present research is that eye movements reflect a word's predictability only when the word can be pre-processed in peripheral vision, before it is directly inspected. In contrast, ERPs reflect a word's predictability even without such pre-processing. By achieving a better understanding of what these two methods are telling us, and the source of the differential effects, the investigators hope to further our knowledge of the ways in which making unconscious predictions about upcoming words can benefit readers. The researchers test the hypothesis that predictability influences eye movements through an influence on early orthographic processing, which is carried out in parafoveal vision while a word is not viewed with maximum visual acuity. This implies a Bayesian account of the predictability effect, whereby the influence of a contextually based prior is strong only when perceptual evidence is relatively ambiguous. The effect of predictability in ERPs is thought to be an entirely distinct effect on late, integrative processes. To test the predictions of these hypotheses, eight eye-movement experiments using the boundary paradigm (in which a word is replaced by a different word until it is directly fixated) will be carried out. Three of these experiments also require participants to detect the change from preview to target explicitly, as the hypotheses make novel predictions about the circumstances in which such changes are detectable. Two of the experiments combine eye-movement recording and the boundary paradigm with concurrent ERP measures. In these experiments the effects of predictability on eye movements and ERPs are expected to be fully dissociable, with one or the other emerging depending on the nature of the preview word and the target word. Finally, the E-Z Reader model of eye movements in reading will be modified to account for these effects, as well as other predictability-related phenomena. A new, publicly available implementation of E-Z Reader will be developed, which will allow other researchers to evaluate the model's architecture and test the effects of changes to model parameters.