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Syntactic expectations modulate parafoveal processing: evidence from the word

n+1 and word n

Article  in  Journal of Vision · October 2020

DOI: 10.1167/jov.20.11.120

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2 authors:

Anastasia Stoops Kiel Christianson

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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 Morphosyntactic information does not seem to modulate parafoveal processing (Fig1) in
linear inflectional morphology languages (English (Kambe, 2004), Finnish (Bertram, 2003),
Malay (Winskel et al., 2014)). To adjudicate between serial and parallel accounts (EZ-Reader
(Reichle et al., 2009) vs SWIFT (Engbert et al., 2005)), such studies report only early first-pass
measures: first-fixation(FF), single-fixation(SF) and gaze-duration(GD). Stoops et al., (2017;
2019) found early and late morphological effects on words n+1 and n, using boundary-change
techniques (Rayner, 1975; Fig2A-B) in Russian, another free-word-order and linear-morphology
language. The preview cost for morphologically-related versus identical and nonword previews
was observed in total time(TT) for word n+1 and across early and late measures on pre- and
post-boundary and whole-word regions in the word n, supporting the idea of increased attention
span for word n (Juhasz et al., 2009). Importantly, the syntactic context of the target word was
relatively unrestricted: morphologically-related preview was the most expected syntactic
continuation according to a Cloze test (78%). The present study examined if the syntactic
predictability modulated parafoveal processing of morphosyntactic information in
Russian on the word n and word n+1 by reversing syntactic expectations for the preview.
In the two experiments, the identical preview has the expected case marker (94% Cloze test
score) and the morphologically-related preview has a syntactically unacceptable case inflection
– second subject (Fig3). Morphologically-related preview on word n+1 didn’t differ from identical
and induced preview benefit versus nonword in TT, suggesting word-level facilitation but no
early message-level morphological preprocessing. Word n manipulation yielded preview benefit
for identical and related versus nonword previews at post-boundary SF and preview cost versus
identical but no difference from nonword at whole-word TT. Results support word-level
facilitation without message-level integration of syntactically unacceptable morphology (Table1).
More cross-linguistic investigations are needed to understand the role of syntactic predictability
on parafoveal processing in reading.

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