Do effects of visual contrast and font difficulty on readers’ eye movements interact with effects of word frequency or predictability?

Abstract

The time a reader’s eyes spend on a word is influenced by visual (e.g., contrast) as well as lexical (e.g., word frequency) and contextual (e.g., predictability) factors. Well-known visual word recognition models predict that visual and higher-level manipulations may have interactive effects on early eye movement measures, because of cascaded processing between levels. Previous eye movement studies provide conflicting evidence as to whether they do, possibly because of inconsistent manipulations or limited statistical power. In the present study, 2 highly powered experiments used sentences in which a target word’s frequency and predictability were factorially manipulated. Experiment 1 also manipulated visual contrast, and Experiment 2 also manipulated font difficulty. Robust main effects of all manipulations were evident in both experiments. In Experiment 1, interactions between the effect of contrast and the effects of frequency and predictability were numerically small and statistically unreliable in both early (word skipping, first fixation duration) and later (gaze duration, go-past time) measures. In Experiment 2, frequency and predictability did demonstrate convincing interactions with font difficulty, but only in the later measures, possibly implicating a checking mechanism. We conclude that although the predicted interactions in early eye movement measures may exist, they are sufficiently weak that they are difficult to detect even in large eye movement experiments.

Effects of word predictability on eye movements during Arabic reading

“…Target words were considered highly predictable if produced on more than 60% of completions, and of low predictability if produced on less than 15% of completions (Experiment 1 , high-predictability, M = 89%, SD = 10, low-predictability, M = 0.4%, SD = 2, t (71) = 78.52, p < .001; Experiment 2 , high-predictability, M = 90%, SD = 9, low-predictability, M = 1%, SD = 3, t (71) = 77.43, p < .001). Note that these cut-offs are consistent with cut-offs used in other word predictability studies (Frisson et al, 2017 ; Miellet et al, 2007 ; Rayner et al, 2011 ; Staub, 2020 ; see Staub, 2015 , for a discussion). For each sentence, 24 additional participants (per experiment) rated sentence plausibility on a 5-point scale (1 = highly implausible, 5 = highly plausible).…”

“…No previous studies have examined word predictability effects on eye movements in Arabic reading. The simulation therefore used effect sizes computed using means and standard deviations from three previous word-predictability studies conducted in English (Frisson et al, 2017 ; Sereno et al, 2018 ; Staub, 2020 ). Power curves based on these effect sizes are shown in Fig.…”

“…The decision to skip a predictable word is necessarily based on both information obtained from outside of foveal vision (i.e., in parafoveal vision) and predictions derived from the prior sentence context. Such decisions will therefore depend on the strength of the predictions and the quality of parafoveal information, including available information about word length and orthography (e.g., Balota et al, 1985;Chang, Hao, et al, 2020a;Chang, Zhang, et al, 2020b;Choi et al, 2017;Juhasz et al, 2008;Schotter et al, 2015;Staub, 2020;Staub & Goddard, 2019;Veldre & Andrews, 2018;White et al, 2005). One possibility is that the available parafoveal information does not support predictability effects on wordskipping in Arabic.…”

Impact of neovascular age-related macular degeneration on eye-movement control during scene viewing: Viewing biases and guidance by visual salience

“…This allowed us to explore the degree to which subjects differed in their responses above and beyond belonging to their subject group, which was modelled as a fixed effect. If there are genuine differences between individuals, including by-subject random effects should lead to an improvement in model fit (see Staub, 2020).…”

Predictability eliminates neighborhood effects during Chinese sentence reading

“…Sereno et al, 2018). In addition, Staub (2020) has recently shown that predictability demonstrates only very weak, if any, interaction with visual contrast and font difficulty in the earliest eyemovement measures. These findings are arguably surprising on the view that predictability influences early processing stages by means of preactivation, given that these stages are, presumably, also influenced by factors such as frequency and contrast.…”