Focus takes time: structural effects on reading

Previous eye-tracking work has yielded inconsistent evidence regarding whether readers spend more or less time encoding focused information compared with information that is not focused. We report the results of an eye-tracking experiment that used syntactic structure to manipulate whether a target...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychonomic bulletin & review 2015-12, Vol.22 (6), p.1733-1738
Main Authors: Lowder, Matthew W., Gordon, Peter C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Brief Report
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive Psychology
Experiments
Eye Movement Measurements
Eye Movements - physiology
Humans
Linguistics
Psycholinguistics
Psychology
Psychomotor Performance - physiology
Reading
Syntax
Time Factors
Young Adult
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Summary:Previous eye-tracking work has yielded inconsistent evidence regarding whether readers spend more or less time encoding focused information compared with information that is not focused. We report the results of an eye-tracking experiment that used syntactic structure to manipulate whether a target word was linguistically defocused, neutral, or focused, while controlling for possible oculomotor differences across conditions. As the structure of the sentence made the target word increasingly more focused, reading times systematically increased. We propose that the longer reading times for linguistically focused words reflect deeper encoding, which explains previous findings showing that readers have better subsequent memory for focused versus defocused information.
ISSN:1069-9384
1531-5320
DOI:10.3758/s13423-015-0843-2