Ординатура / Офтальмология / Английские материалы / Eye Movements A Window on Mind and Brain_Van Gompel_2007

regressions out of the compounds during their first pass, as percentage of regressions did not significantly vary as a function of transparency or lexeme frequency (all p’s > 0 25).

4. Discussion

Similar to past eye-movement studies examining compound word recognition, there was a small effect of beginning lexeme frequency on first fixation durations in the present experiment (e.g. Andrews et al., 2004; Hyönä & Pollatsek, 1998; Juhasz et al., 2003). Somewhat differing from these studies, this main effect was qualified by an interaction due to the fact that only compounds composed of two low-frequency lexemes differed significantly in terms of their first fixation durations. In gaze durations in the present study there was a large effect of beginning lexeme frequency (36 ms) and a smaller effect of ending lexeme frequency (16 ms). In terms of previous published experiments with English compound words, these results appear consistent with Andrews et al. and call into question the possibility suggested by Juhasz et al. that the ending lexeme has a privileged role in English compound word recognition. Instead, as Bertram and Hyönä (2003) suggested, it may be that the length of the compounds is what determines the pattern of lexeme frequency effects. The inclusion of longer compound words in the present experiment may have resulted in more robust beginning lexeme effects.

There was no effect of transparency on first fixation durations in the present experiment. This is not surprising since a reader presumably cannot tell whether a compound is opaque or transparent until the second lexeme and/or whole compound is identified. On gaze durations there were main effects of transparency that did not interact with lexeme frequency. Finally, on go-past durations there were again main effects of transparency and second lexeme frequency. However, in this measure transparency did interact with beginning lexeme frequency.

The finding of a main effect of transparency on gaze durations supports the results of Underwood et al. (1990) using English compound words but differs from the results of Pollatsek and Hyönä (2005) using Finnish compound words. One may be tempted to explain this difference as a function of the two languages. However, Frisson, NiswanderKlement, and Pollatsek (2006) recently also examined the role of semantic transparency for English compound words and failed to find any effects. They paired words where both lexemes were transparently related in meaning to the compound word with either partially or fully opaque words. Frisson et al. did not find any effects of transparency on fixation durations or percentage of regressions out of the compound words. Given these discrepancy in results, one may wish to view the present main effect of transparency somewhat cautiously. As mentioned previously, opaque and transparent words were embedded in different sentence frames in the present experiment, although every attempt was made to keep the sentences as uniform as possible.

However, the main effect of transparency is not the most important finding from the gaze duration analyses. Instead, the finding that the frequency of both lexemes influences gaze durations and that these effects do not interact with the transparency of the compound

suggests that both transparent and opaque compound words are decomposed in a similar fashion during the early stages of recognition. These findings support the main conclusions from Pollatsek and Hyönä (2005) and Frisson et al. (2006) that semantic transparency of compound words does not mediate the decomposition process. In contrast to the view of morphology discussed in the introduction, the results from these studies do not support the notion that only semantically transparent morphologically complex items are linked to the representations of their morphemes.

The present results from the go-past measure add an important caveat to this conclusion. The go-past duration measure can be conceptualized as a measure of how easily the compound word meaning is integrated with the meaning of the sentence. In this measure there were main effects of transparency and ending lexeme frequency. However, beginning lexeme frequency only had a significant effect for transparent compounds. The difference between lexeme frequency effects as a function of semantic transparency in gaze duration compared to go-past duration is somewhat analogous to the difference between results with lexeme repetition and semantic priming in the lexical decision task highlighted in the Introduction. These results can be explained if transparent compound words are tied to the representations of their lexemes at two different levels in the lexicon. Libben (1998) described a model of compound word recognition that incorporates this hypothesis. His model is composed of three different levels: stimulus, lexical, and conceptual. The compound word is encountered at the stimulus level and is decomposed. If the compound word is not novel, it is connected to both of its decomposed lexemes as well as its whole-word representation at the lexical level. Facilitory links exist at the lexical level between the lexemes and the whole-word form. Finally, the lexical whole-word form is also linked to the conceptual whole-word representation of the compound as well as the conceptual representation for any lexemes it shares meaning with. For example, the transparent compound blueberry will be connected to its lexeme representations on both the lexical and the conceptual level. In contrast, the partially opaque compound word strawberry will be connected to both of its lexemes on a lexical level, but will only be connected to its ending lexeme berry on the conceptual level.

Libben’s (1998) theory can incorporate the dual-route model of Pollatsek et al. (2000), which has been very useful for understanding compound word processing. Specifically, the whole-word lexical representation of the compound word can be accessed through either the decomposed lexemes (which have facilitory links to the whole-word lexical representation) or through the entire compound. Which route dominates could be a function of the length of the compound, as suggested by Bertram and Hyönä (2003). The idea that a dual-route to the lexical (non-semantic) representation of the compound word exists was also suggested by Pollatsek and Hyönä (2005).

The Libben (1998) model can also provide an explanation for the interaction between transparency and beginning lexeme frequency in go-past durations in the present study if one assumes that high-frequency concepts are easier to integrate into sentences. Transparent compounds are related in meaning to their lexemes, and are therefore linked to those lexemes on the conceptual level. If these concepts are high in frequency, this may aid the integration process. Opaque compounds are not related in meaning to

their lexemes, so they are not linked to them on a conceptual level and therefore the frequency of their lexemes makes no difference at the conceptual level. Of course, this conceptualization of the model would predict interactions of transparency with both lexeme frequencies. In the present case only an interaction was observed for beginning lexeme frequency. This is most likely due to the fact that the opaque compounds used in the present study were not always completely opaque, as defined by Libben. It is possible that on average in the present stimuli the opaque compounds were more related in meaning to their ending lexeme.

The present results coupled with the results from other previous studies provide a convincing case for an early decomposition process that operates at a level prior to semantics. The next question to address is how this quick “pre-semantic” decomposition operates. One possibility would be that information about the morphological status of the upcoming word is processed in the parafovea. However, in English no evidence of morphological processing in the parafovea has been obtained (e.g., Kambe, 2004; Lima, 1987), although evidence has been obtained in Hebrew (Deutsch, Frost, Pelleg, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2003). Therefore, at least for English this pre-semantic decomposition process must begin once the word is fixated. Seidenberg (1987) suggested that the frequencies associated with letter clusters around morpheme boundaries could provide a possible low-level segmentation cue. However, the only sentence-reading experiment to explicitly examine this with compound words did not find any evidence for an effect of bigram frequency (Inhoff, Radach, & Heller, 2000). There is some evidence from Finnish (Bertram, Pollatsek, & Hyönä, 2004) that other types of information such as vowel harmony can provide useful segmentation cues for decomposition. This suggests that readers can make use of some low-level cues. However, these cues are not language universal, so they cannot be the only way the pre-semantic decomposition operates.

Libben (1994; Libben, Derwig, & de Almeida, 1999) has suggested that all morphologically legal decompositions are fed to the lexical level for analysis. This conclusion is reached through work with ambiguous novel compound words such as clamprod, where both parses (clam-prod vs clamp-rod) appear to be activated. Work with Finnish compound words, however, may call this hypothesis into question. Hyönä, Bertram, and Pollatsek (2004) presented readers with non-spaced bilexemic Finnish compound words where the ending lexeme was masked prior to fixation. Masking the ending lexeme had no effect on fixation times on the beginning lexeme. This suggests that the lexemes are accessed sequentially in compound words and the morphological legality of the ending lexeme is not checked prior to the access of the beginning lexeme’s lexical representation.

In conclusion, the present results provide evidence for an early pre-semantic decomposition mechanism in reading. However, it is still an open question as to how this mechanism operates. There are now quite sophisticated computational models of eye movements during reading. The majority of these models do not take into account the morphological complexity of the word currently being fixated. One exception to this is Pollatsek, Reichle, and Rayner (2003), who adjusted the E-Z Reader model (Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher, & Rayner, 1998) to account for the pattern of compound frequency

effects observed in Finnish. Basically, in this version of the model, the lexemes in a compound are accessed serially and then the meaning of the compound is “glued” together with a formula that is sensitive to the whole-word frequency. However, as Bertram and Hyönä (2003) point out, this model could most likely not account for their finding that the length of the compound modified the pattern of decomposition. This model also does not attempt to address how the decomposition process occurs. While modeling morphological processes may present somewhat of a challenge for modelers, hopefully future eye-movement models will also attempt to model how morphological processes affect eye movements and will be able to take these aspects into account.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Grant 16745 from the National Institute of Mental Health. I would like to thank Matt Starr for all of his help with various aspects of this experiment, Sarah Brown for her help in collecting ratings, as well as Keith Rayner, Rebecca Johnson, Robin Hill, Jukka Hyönä, and Sarah White for their helpful comments on the manuscript. Requests for reprints or the materials used in this study should be sent to Barbara J. Juhasz, Department of Psychology, 207 High Street, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, 06459, USA.

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Abstract

This study investigated whether a morphological preview benefit can be obtained in Finnish with the eye contingent display change paradigm. For that purpose, we embedded in sentences compound words with long or short 1st constituents, while manipulating the amount of information available of the 1st constituent before the compound word was fixated. In the change conditions, the first 3–4 letters were made available parafoveally, which constituted the whole 1st constituent in the case of the short, but only part of the 1st constituent in the case of the long 1st constituents. The results showed that the change manipulation was equally effective for long and short 1st constituent compounds, indicating that in reading Finnish there is no morphological preview benefit. On the other hand, 1st constituent length affected several eye movement measures, indicating that the role of morphology in lexical processing is constrained by visual acuity principles.

When readers fixate on a word, they spend a certain amount of time to access and identify that very word. At the same time, in languages like Finnish or English, they often retrieve information from the word to the right of the fixated word. There is an ongoing debate about the nature of the information that is picked up from the word next to the fixated word. It is widely agreed that low-level features like word length and letter identity of the first few letters are parafoveally processed. However, whereas some scholars claim that parafoveal processing is predominantly visual-orthographic in nature (e.g., Rayner, Balota, & Pollatsek, 1986), others posit that effects of parafoveal processing extend to higher linguistic levels (e.g., Kennedy, 2000; Murray, 1998). In the face of the current empirical evidence, it can be argued that evidence for semantic preprocessing is marginal at best and often restricted to tasks that only mimic natural reading to some extent (Rayner, White, Kambe, Miller, & Liversedge, 2003).

On one higher linguistic level, namely the morphological level, the current evidence is contradictory. It seems that depending on the language, morphological preprocessing may or may not take place. More specifically, Lima (1987), Inhoff (1989), and Kambe (2004) did not observe any preview benefits for morphological units in English. In contrast, Deutsch and her colleagues have observed in several studies that word processing in Hebrew significantly benefits from having a parafoveal preview of the word’s morphological root (Deutsch, Frost, Pelleg, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2003; Deutsch, Frost, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2000, 2005). The differences between Hebrew and English are notable in many respects (script, reading direction, non-concatenative vs concatenative morphology), which have led Kambe (2004) and Deutsch et al. (2003) to argue that the morphological richness of Hebrew in comparison to English may well be the main reason for the earlier and more prominent impact of morphological structure on word processing in Hebrew. Kambe explicitly states also that in a highly inflected language like Finnish (with concatenative morphology, and the same script and reading direction as in English), morphological preview benefits may be found. In the current study we explored by means of the eye contingent change paradigm (Rayner, 1975) whether this is indeed the case. For long compound words with either a short 1st constituent (HÄÄ/SEREMONIA ‘wedding ceremony’) or a long 1st constituent (KONSERTTI/SALI ‘concert hall’), either a full preview (i.e., the whole word, also coined the ‘no change condition’) or a partial preview of 3–4 letters (also coined ‘the change condition’) was provided. In the partial preview condition, the first 3–4 letters amounted to the complete 1st constituent when the constituent was short, but to only part of the constituent when it was long. We reasoned that the partial preview would be more beneficial for short 1st constituent compounds, if Finnish readers indeed accessed the morphological code in the parafovea. If, on the other hand, the preview benefit is purely orthographic in nature, a change effect of similar size should be found for long and short 1st constituent compounds.

The use of compound words is a good way to study morphological preview effects in Finnish, since the processing of Finnish compound words has been quite intensively studied. In fact, there are two compound word studies (Hyönä & Bertram, 2004; Hyönä & Pollatsek, 1998) that have touched upon the issue of parafoveal processing in