Pynte, J., New, B., & Kennedy, A. (2008). On-line contextual influences during reading normal text: A multiple-regression analysis. Vision Research, 48(21), 2172-2183.

Pynte, J.; New, B.; Kennedy, A.

2008

Pynte, J., New, B., & Kennedy, A. (2008). On-line contextual influences during reading normal text: A multiple-regression analysis. Vision Research, 48(21), 2172-2183.

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On-line contextual influences during reading were examined in a series of multiple-regression analyses conducted on a large-scale corpus of eye-movement data, using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to assess the degree of contextual constraints exerted on a given target word by the immediately prior word and by the prior sentence fragment. A decrease in inspection time was observed as contextual constraints increased. Word-level constraints exerted their influence both forward (on both single-fixation and gaze durations) and backward (on gaze duration only). An independent sentence-level effect was only visible in the forward direction, and only for gaze duration. Gaze duration was also sensitive to the depth of embedding of the target word in the syntactic structure. We conclude that both low-level and high-level contextual constraints can translate in the eye-movement record.

Word-level semantic constraints were found to exert both forward and backward influences (only for gaze duration in the backward case), whereas only forward sentence-level effects were visible, and only for gaze duration. Gaze duration was also found to be sensitive to the depth of embedding of the target word in the syntactic structure. Although local inter-word associations seem to be responsible for most of the early effects, higher-level processes can apparently exert an influence of their own, at a post-lexical integration level.

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