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

Traditionally, vector-based semantic space models use word co-occurrence counts from large corpora to represent lexical meaning. In this article we present a novel framework for constructing semantic spaces that take syntactic relations into account. We introduce a formalization for this class of models which allows linguistic knowledge to guide the construction process. We evaluate our framework on a range of tasks relevant for cognitive science and natural language processing: semantic priming, synonymy detection and word sense disambiguation. In all cases, our framework obtains results that are comparable or superior to the state of the art. 1.

The authors present several versions of a general model, titled the E-Z Reader model, of eye movement control in reading. The major goal of the modeling is to relate cognitive processing (specifically aspects of lexical access) to eye movements in reading. The earliest and simplest versions of the model (E-Z Readers 1 and 2) merely attempt to explain the total time spent on a word before moving forward (the gaze duration) and the probability of fixating a word; later versions (E-Z Readers 3-5) also attempt to explain the durations of individual fixations on individual words and the number of fixations on individual words. The final version (E-Z Reader 5) appears to be psychologically plausible and gives a good account of many phenomena in reading. It is also a good tool for analyzing eye movement data in reading. Limitations of the model and directions for future research are also discussed.

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A central concern of psycholinguistic research is explaining the relative ease or difficulty involved in processing words. In this thesis, we explore the connection between lexical processing effort and measurable properties of the linguistic environment. Distributional information (information about a word's contexts of use) is easily extracted from large language corpora in the form of co-occurrence statistics. We claim that such simple distributional statistics can form the basis of a parsimonious model of lexical processing effort.

Four eye-movement monitoring studies examined the processing of expressions argued to require enriched semantic composition (Pustejovsky, 1995). Previous research found that noun phrases denoting entities (e.g., the book) were difficult to process following verbs that require event complements (e.g., begin). Expressions like began the book may be difficult to process because they require complex operations to construct an event sense (e.g., began writing the book), they engender competition between alternative interpretations (cf. began reading the book), or they require a costly retrieval operation to recover a suitable activity (e.g., reading). Introducing the activity before a target expression did not eliminate the processing cost (Experiments 1 and 2), but introducing the entire event sense did (Experiments 3 and 4). These findings are incompatible with ambiguity- or retrieval-based accounts and suggest that interpretation is costly when composition requires construction of a sense not lexically stored or available in the immediate discourse. 3 A suitable interpretation for an expression, a phrase or clause, can sometimes be derived by simply combining key semantic properties of the individual words according to their syntactic position in the sentence (e.g., Jackendoff, 1997, 2002). In such circumstances, semantic properties retrieved from lexical representations and grammatical constraints associated with syntactic representations will uniquely determine the interpretation of the expression. Accordingly, the compositional mechanism---the critical interface between lexical and syntactic processing on one hand and discourse and text comprehension on the other---might be thought of as rather minimal, consisting merely of rules or principles for recursively combining...

When the sentence She ran her best time yet in the rice last week is displayed using rapid serial visual presentation, viewers sometimes misread rice as race (M. C. Potter, A. Moryadas, I. Abrams, & A. Noel, 1993). Seven experiments combined misreading and repetition blindness (RB) paradigms to determine whether misreading of a word because of biasing sentence context represents a genuine perceptual effect. In Experiments 1–4, misreading a word either caused or prevented RB for a downstream word, depending on whether orthographic similarity was increased or decreased. Additional experiments examined temporal parameters of misreading RB and tested the hypothesis that RB results from reconstructive memory processes. Results suggest that the effect of prior context occurs during perception. Questions concerning the role of sentence context in the process of visual word recognition continue to be some of the most contentious in the field of cognitive psychology. Although the idea that sentence context can influence visual word recognition is widely accepted, there is considerable controversy over just how, and when, context has its effects. Competing models of word

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