Lecturers

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Talk abstracts


Distributed processing during fixation durations in reading
Reinhold Kliegl
Chair of Division Cognitive Psychology, University of Potsdam, Germany

Fixation durations are indicators of visual, lexical and semantic processing of words in the perceptual span as well as continued processing of earlier words. Moreover, they inform about oculomotor control. Current theoretical proposals differ with respect to what information becomes available from which word and at what time. In this presentation, I illustrate how multivariate statistics of the analyses of eye-movement corpora, such as those collected for the Potsdam Sentence Corpus, can contribute to these questions. I will also introduce and compare this statistical-control approach with experimental-control approaches, such as gaze-contingent display changes. 

High-level cognition and eye movements during reading
Reinhold Kliegl
Chair of Division Cognitive Psychology, University of Potsdam, Germany

With a basic understanding of how fixation durations (and their locations) respond to local low-level processing difficulty we can also examine how these indicators are moderated by global processing factors. In this presentation, I illustrate this with the following (quasi-)experimental manipulations: (a) age of reader, (b) visibility of text, (c) difficulty of questions expected about the sentences read, and (c) predictability of the words of the sentence (e.g., proverbs vs. average high predictability vs. average low predictability).

Eye movements in reading syntactically ambiguous sentences in Russian language
Aleksandr Latanov, Victor Anisimov
Department of higher nervous activity, Moscow State University, Russia

We studied eye movement parameters in reading syntactically ambiguous (locally and globally) and unambiguous (as control) sentences with relative clause. The parsing of ambiguous sentences slows down the reading compared with parsing of unambiguous sentences. Moreover the subjects read locally ambiguous sentences with late closure slower than globally and locally with early closure ambiguous sentences. We suppose that the domintheation of early closure principle in Russian language determines fewer efforts in disambiguation latter sentence types that shortening their reading time.


Russian eye-tracking corpus
Anna Laurinavichyute
HSE, Moscow, Russia

This talk will cover the deisign and the first preliminary results obtained from the Russian eye-tracking corpus. We will talk about whether and how word length, frequency and predictability in a given context ingluence the eye-movement pattern of the readers.


Length constraint hypothesis in parafoveal processing during reading: evidence from Russian
Svetlana Alekseeva
St. Petersburg State University, Russia

Length constraint hypothesis (LCH) in reading suggested that information about upcoming word letters in combination with its length processed parafoveally (when the target word is not fixated yet) can be used to constrain the possible lexical candidate for the word to be recognized [Clark & O’Regan, 1999]. This hypothesis is the result of the reading experiments with boundary technique where length [Rayner, 1975]  or first letters of the upcoming words are manipulated. In the boundary paradigm readers’ eyes are monitored using eyetrackers and the invisible boundary is put in the sentences. Prior to the fixating the target word, the preview word is placed in the sentence instead of the target, when the eyes cross the over the boundary the preview word is replaced by the target. Researches in the field show that the accurate few first letters [Rayner, McConkie, & Zola, 1980] and word length [Inhoff et als., 1998] is crucial  for reading process. Another explanation of the great role of the word length (except of LCH) during reading is oculomotor reasons. By providing readers with an incorrect length preview word, the eyes jump to the nonoptimal viewing position in the target that causes the increase of fixation time after display change.
The goal of the research is to confirm length constrain hypothesis in Russian.


Features of eye movements in reading texts by Russian-speaking students with different levels of language proficiency
Valeria Demareva
Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod, Russia

This study aims to identify markers of foreign language proficiency in the eye-movement trajectories while working with texts. The goal is to test the hypothesis that the eye movement parameters of people with a high level of foreign language skills are similar when reading texts in native and foreign languages. Another task is to elicit parameters that would allow determining the level of English skills in order to differentiate between elementary and intermediate. We offer new metrics for evaluation of the linguistic competence level using eye-tracking. 


From high to low level reading processing
Daria Chernova,  Veronica Prokopenya,  Alena Konina
St. Petersburg State University, Russia

In our talk we focus on three domains of high-level sentence processing: structural and referential ambiguity and translation quality assessment. Structural ambiguity resolution is a widely discussed problem in sentence processing studies, we consider the case of ambiguous adjunct attachment to a complex NP in Russian using eye-tracking technique. We report differences in early stage preferences and late stage preferences (which correspond to offline data). In referential ambiguity resolution study participants had to resolve personal pronoun ambiguity. The analysis of the oculomotor behaviour showed the ambiguity advantage effect in reading times and robust primacy effect in sentence processing. The study of quality assessment aimed at describing experts` reading strategies in comparison to  those applied by native speakers or translators. Analysis of subjective and objective translation quality assessments gives an insight into their disparity.