Recent studies of eye movements in reading and other information processing tasks, such as music reading, typing, visual search, and scene perception, are reviewed. The major emphasis of the review is on reading as a specific example of cognitive processing. Basic topics discussed with respect to reading are (a) the characteristics of eye movements, (b) the perceptual span, (c) integration of information across saccades, (d) eye movement control, and (e) individual differences (including dyslexia). Similar topics are discussed with respect to the other tasks examined. The basic theme of the review is that eye movement data reflect moment-to-moment cognitive processes in the various tasks examined. Theoretical and practical considerations concerning the use of eye movement data are also discussed. Many studies using eye movements to investigate cognitive processes have appeared over the past 20 years. In an earlier review, I (Rayner, 1978b) argued that since the mid-1970s we have been in a third era of eye movement research and that the success of research in the current era would depend on the ingenuity of researchers in designing interesting and informative

The results of two self-paced reading studies of a syntactic ambiguity involving conjoined noun phrases to three potential noun phrase sites were compared to the corpus frequencies of the resolutions of the same ambiguity. The reading times for the attachment to the first noun phrase were faster than for the attachment to the second noun phrase, but, to the extent that any differences were observed in the corpus frequencies, attachments to the second noun phrase were more frequent. We therefore argue that the sentence comprehension mechanism is not using corpus frequencies in arriving at its preference in this ambiguity, and hence the decision principles of sentence comprehension and sentence production must be partially distinct. It is proposed that there is a factor operative in sentence comprehension that is not operative in sentence production, and this factor favors attachment to the first noun phrase. © 1999 Academic Press According to an influential proposal by Don Mitchell, Fernando Cuetos, and their colleagues, initial parsing preferences in syntactically ambiguous structures are determined by people’s exposure to similar structures in the

This study compares the way English-speaking children and adult second language leamers of English resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences such as The dean liked the secretary of the professor who was reading a letter. Two groups of advanced L2 leamers of English with Greek or German as their L 1 participated in a set of off-line and on-line tasks. While the participants' disambiguation preferences were influenced by lexical-semantic properties of the preposition linking the two potential antecedent NPs (of vs. with), there was no evidence that they were applying any structure-based ambiguity resolution strategies of the type that have been claimed to influence sentence processing in monolingual adults. These findings differ markedly from those obtained from 6 to 7 year- old monolingual English children in a parallel auditory study (Felser, Marinis, & Clahsen, submitted) in that the children's attachment preferences were not affected by the type of preposition at all. We argue that whereas children primarily rely on structure-based parsing principles during processing, adult L2 leamers are guided mainly by non-structural information.

Seeminglysimpn expglyb?j3 may require an enriched form ofinterpb(59#IA pterpb(59 Verbs like began and finished can be used felicitously only when one of their arguments denotes an event (e.g., reading). However, such verbs commonlyapmon with nounpunb9U whose literalinterp5#A33b(5 denote entities (e.g., the book). It has been suggested that readers and listeners have to undertake additional comptionalb to interpb( strings like began the book that are not required when the book isinterpb(9A as an entity (e.g., Pustejovsky, 1995). If so, began the book should be harder topb559A than strings like read the book, when the verbdoes not require an argument that denotes an event, or strings like began the fight, when the argument denotes an event.Exp.bjAAW 1 found evidence from eye movements showing that entity nounpunbA3 take longer topbjUI? following verbs that require event arguments than verbs that do not.

A central question for psycholinguistics concerns the role of grammatical constraints in online sentence processing. Many current theories maintain that the language processing mechanism constructs a parse or parses that are grammatically consistent with the whole of the perceived input each time it processes a word. Several bottom-up, dynamical models make a contrasting prediction: partial parses which are syntactically compatible with only a proper subpart of the input are sometimes constructed, at least temporarily. Three self-paced reading experiments probed for interference from such locally coherent structures. The first tested for a distracting effect of irrelevant Subject–Predicate interpretations of Noun Phrase–Verb Phrase sequences (e.g., The coach smiled at the player tossed a frisbee) on reading times. The second addressed the question of whether the interference effects can be treated as lexical interference, instead of involving the formation of locally coherent syntactic structures. The third replicated the reading time effects of the first two experiments with grammaticality judgments. We evaluate the dynamical account, comparing it to other approaches that also predict effects of local coherence, and arguing against accounts which rule out the formation of merely locally coherent structures.

This paper investigates the strength of the local attachment preference in syntactic ambiguity resolution, based on a study of a novel ambiguity for which the predictions of local attachment contrast with the predictions of a wide range of other ambiguity resolution principles. In sentences of the form ' 'Because Rose praised the recipe I made... " we show that the ambiguous clause "I made " is preferentially attached as a relative clause under some circumstances, as predicted by local attachment, and preferentially attached as a matrix clause under other circumstances. The implications for accounts of locality in parsing are discussed. THE LOCALITY PUZZLE This paper is a progress report on our work which investigates the strength and the generality of the local attachment preference (see Gibson, Pearlmutter, Canseco-Gonzalez, & Hickok 1996; Phillips 1995, 1996). We use this term to refer in a theory neutral way to whatever underlies the inter-This is a revised version of a talk presented at the Ninth Annual CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing, New York. We are grateflil to the audience for their comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Neal Pearimutter, Carson ScMitze, San Tunstall, Andrea Zukowski, and an anonymous reviewer for valuable assistance and suggestions with this paper. Needless to say, all the remaining errors are our own. The first author's

This article presents two self-paced reading experiments which investigate the role of storage costs associated with maintaining incomplete syntactic dependencies in structural ambiguity resolution. We argue that previous work has been equivocal regarding syntactic influences because it has examined ambiguities where there is little or no resource differential between competing alternatives. The candidate structures of the ambiguities explored here incur substantially different storage costs. The results indicate that storage-based biases can be sufficiently powerful to create difficulty for a structural alternative even when it is promoted by nonsyntactic factors. These findings are incorporated into a model of ambiguity resolution in which structural biases operate as independent graded constraints in selecting between structural alternatives.

Although proximity between arguments and verbs (locality) is a relatively robust determinant of sentenceprocessing di#culty (Hawkins, 1998, 2001; Gibson, 2000), increasing argument-verb distance can also facilitate processing (Konieczny, 2000). We present two self-paced reading (SPR) experiments involving Hindi that provide further evidence of anti-locality, and a third SPR experiment which suggests that similarity-based interference can attenuate this distance-based facilitation. A unified explanation of interference, locality and anti-locality e#ects is proposed via an independently motivated theory of activation decay and retrieval interference (Anderson et al., 2004). 1

This paper investigates the processing of long-distance filler-gap dependencies in Japanese, a strongly head-final language. Two self-paced reading experiments and one sentence completion study show that Japanese readers associate a fronted wh-phrase with the most deeply embedded clause of a multi-clause sentence. Experiment 1 demonstrates this using evidence that readers expect to encounter a scope-marking affix on the verb of an embedded clause in wh-fronting constructions. Experiment 2 shows that the wh-phrase is already associated with the embedded clause before the embedded verb is processed, based on a Japanese counterpart of the Filled Gap Effect (Stowe, 1986). Experiment 3 corroborates these findings in a sentence completion study. These findings clarify the factors responsible for Ôactive fillerÕ effects in processing long-distance dependencies (Crain & Fodor, 1985; Fodor, 1978; Frazier & Clifton, 1989; Stowe, 1986) in ways not possible in head-initial languages. The results provide evidence that the processing of filler-gap dependencies is driven by the need to satisfy thematic role requirements of the fronted phrase, rather than by the need to create a gap as soon as possible. The paper also discusses implications of these findings for theories of reanalysis.

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