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Keith Rayner

Publications and source records attributed to Keith Rayner.

43 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
PubMed2003

Investigating the effects of a set of intercorrelated variables on eye fixation durations in reading.

The present experiment investigated the influence of 5 intercorrelated variables on word recognition using a multiple regression analysis. The 5 variables were word frequency, subjective familiarity, word length, concreteness, and age of acquisition (AoA). Target words were embedded in sentences and eye tracking methodology was used to investigate the predictive power of these variables. All 5 variables were found to influence reading time. However, the time course of these variables differed. Both word frequency and familiarity showed an early but lasting influence on eye fixation durations. Word length only significantly predicted fixation durations after refixations on the target words were taken into account. This is the 1st experiment to demonstrate concreteness and AoA effects on eye fixations.

Attention↗
PubMed2003

Reading disappearing text: cognitive control of eye movements.

Participants read sentences containing high- or low-frequency target words under normal reading conditions or disappearing-text conditions (in which the word that was fixated disappeared after 60 ms). Even though the fixated word had disappeared after 60 ms, there was still a robust frequency effect wherein readers fixated longer on low-frequency words than on high-frequency words. Thus, the results are consistent with cognitive-control models of eye movement control and inconsistent with visual/oculomotor-control models. Although the uptake of visual information is clearly important for reading, it is the cognitive processes associated with understanding the fixated words that drive the eyes through the text.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

Early morphological effects in reading: evidence from parafoveal preview benefit in Hebrew.

Hebrew words are composed of two interwoven morphemes: a triconsonantal root and a word pattern. We examined the role of the root morpheme in word identification by assessing the benefit of presentation of a parafoveal preview word derived from the same root as a target word. Although the letter information of the preview was not consciously perceived, a preview of a word derived from the same root morpheme as the foveal target word facilitated eye-movement measures of first-pass reading (i.e.,first fixation and gaze duration). These results are the first to demonstrate early morphological effects in the context of sentence reading in which no external task is imposed on the reader, and converge with previous findings of morphemic priming in Hebrew using the masked priming paradigm, and morphemic parafoveal preview benefit effects in a single-word identification task.

Eye Movements↗
PubMed2003

An eye-movement-contingent probe paradigm.

A new eye-movement-contingent probe task is presented in which readers' eye movements are monitored as they read sentences and respond to a probe word; the timing of the display of the probe word is dependent on fixation of a target word. The present study examined semantic priming effects. The target word was either related (doctor) or unrelated (lawyer) to the probe word (nurse), and the probe appeared 120, 250, 500, or 750 msec after the reader first fixated on the target word. When the probe word appeared (in the location of the target word), the rest of the sentence disappeared until the participant named the probe word. Then the sentence reappeared, and the participant continued reading the sentence. Naming times to the probe word were recorded, as was sentence reading time and the eye movement behavior relative to the onset of the probe word. Priming effects were observed, since probe reaction time to related probes was faster than that to unrelated probes. Ways in which this paradigm can be used to study various issues in language processing are discussed.

Eye Movements↗
PubMed2002

Simple rotary motion is integrated across fixations.

Participants were shown a line rotating at a constant angular velocity and were asked to judge whether motion was continuous or whether the line jumped (i.e., moved either forward or backward in the rotary cycle). In two experiments, the participants were significantly better than chance in detecting these jumps in simple rotary motion even when the jumps occurred during a saccade. Moreover, in Experiment 2, when the jump occurred during a saccade followed by a masking flash, perception of the jump was at least as good as when it occurred during a fixation followed by a masking flash. These results complement and extend the findings of Verfaillie and co-workers, who found that perceptions of some changes in biological motion were as good across fixations as when they occurred during a fixation. These findings are in contrast to the common finding, in the reading literature, that people are consciously "blind" to many changes in the text and to those, in the scene perception literature, in which detection of static changes across fixations is above chance but plausibly well below the level that would be expected if the change occurred during a fixation.

Fixation, Ocular↗
PubMed2002

The processing of consonants and vowels in reading: evidence from the fast priming paradigm.

We assessed the early encoding of consonant and vowel information in the reading of English, using the fast priming paradigm. With 30-msec prime durations, gaze durations on target words were shorter when preceded by high-frequency consonant-same primes (which shared consonant information with the target word; e.g., lake-like) than when preceded by vowel-same primes (which shared vowel information with the target word; e.g., line-like), but there were no priming effects for low-frequency primes. With 45-msec prime durations, however, there was no effect of prime frequency and gaze durations on target words were shortened equally when they were preceded by consonant-same primes and vowel-same primes, as compared with control primes (e.g., late-like). The results suggest that the processing of consonants is more rapid than that of vowels, providing further evidence for the distinction between consonant and vowel processing in the reading of English.

Adult↗