Abstract
Although computational models of eye-movement control during reading have been used to explain how saccadic programming, visual constraints, attention allocation, and lexical processing jointly affect eye movements during reading, these models have largely ignored the issue of how higher level, postlexical language processing affects eye movements. The present article shows how one of these models, E-Z Reader (Pollatsek, Reichle, & Rayner, 2006c), can be augmented to redress this limitation. Simulations show that with a few simple assumptions, the model can account for the fact that effects of higher level language processing are not observed on eye movements when such processing is occurring without difficulty, but can capture the patterns of eye movements that are observed when such processing is slowed or disrupted.
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Preliminary parts of this work were presented at the 2008 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing in Chapel Hill, NC. This work was supported by NIH R01 Grant HD053639, which was awarded to the first and second authors, and NIH R03 Grant HD048990 to the second author. Portions of this work were also completed while the first author was a fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, Germany. The work described in this article benefited from discussions with Fernanda Ferreira, Don Mitchell, Alexander Pollatsek, Keith Rayner, and Adrian Staub.
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Reichle, E.D., Warren, T. & McConnell, K. Using E-Z reader to model the effects of higher level language processing on eye movements during reading. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16, 1–21 (2009). https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.16.1.1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.16.1.1
Keywords
- Target Word
- Language Processing
- Fixation Duration
- Lexical Processing
- Reader Model