The Effect of Word Predictability on Phonological Activation in Cantonese Reading: A Study of Eye-Fixations and Pupillary Response

The Chinese lexicon of deaf readers: A database of character decisions and a comparison between deaf and hearing readers

We present a psycholinguistic study investigating lexical effects on simplified Chinese character recognition by deaf readers. Prior research suggests that deaf readers exhibit efficient orthographic processing and decreased reliance on speech-based phonology in word recognition compared to hearing readers. In this large-scale character decision study (25 participants, each evaluating 2500 real characters and 2500 pseudo-characters), we analyzed various factors influencing character recognition accuracy and speed in deaf readers. Deaf participants demonstrated greater accuracy and faster recognition when characters were more frequent, were acquired earlier, had more strokes, displayed higher orthographic complexity, were more imageable in reference, or were less concrete in reference. Comparison with a previous study of hearing readers revealed that the facilitative effect of frequency on character decision accuracy was stronger for deaf readers than hearing readers. The effect of orthographic-phonological regularity differed significantly for the two groups, indicating that deaf readers rely more on orthographic structure and less on phonological information during character recognition. Notably, increased stroke counts (i.e., higher orthographic complexity) hindered hearing readers but facilitated recognition processes in deaf readers, suggesting that deaf readers excel at recognizing characters based on orthographic structure. The database generated from this large-scale character decision study offers a valuable resource for further research and practical applications in deaf education and literacy.

Individual Differences in Political Ideology and Disgust Sensitivity Affect Real-Time Spoken Language Comprehension

Individuals' moral views have been shown to affect their event-related potentials (ERP) response to spoken statements, and people's political ideology has been shown to guide their sentence completion behavior. Using pupillometry, we asked whether political ideology and disgust sensitivity affect online spoken language comprehension. 60 native speakers of English listened to spoken utterances while their pupil size was tracked. Some of those utterances contained grammatical errors, semantic anomalies, or socio-cultural violations, statements incongruent with existing gender stereotypes and perceived speaker identity, such as "I sometimes buy my bras at Hudson's Bay," spoken by a male speaker. An individual's disgust sensitivity is associated with the Behavioral Immune System, and may be correlated with socio-political attitudes, for example regarding out-group stigmatization. We found that more disgust-sensitive individuals showed greater pupil dilation with semantic anomalies and socio-cultural violations. However, political views differently affected the processing of the two types of violations: whereas more conservative listeners showed a greater pupil response to socio-cultural violations, more progressive listeners engaged more with semantic anomalies, but this effect appeared much later in the pupil record.

Orthographic and phonological activation in Hong Kong deaf readers: An eye-tracking study

We used an error disruption paradigm to investigate how deaf readers from Hong Kong, who had varying levels of reading fluency, use orthographic, phonological, and mouth-shape-based (i.e., "visemic") codes during Chinese sentence reading while also examining the role of contextual information in facilitating lexical retrieval and integration. Participants had their eye movements recorded as they silently read Chinese sentences containing orthographic, homophonic, homovisemic, or unrelated errors. Sentences varied in terms of how much contextual information was available leading up to the target word. Fixation time analyses revealed that in early fixation measures, deaf readers activated word meanings primarily through orthographic representations. However, in contexts where targets were highly predictable, fixation times on homophonic errors decreased relative to those on unrelated errors, suggesting that higher levels of contextual predictability facilitated early phonological activation. In the measure of total reading time, results indicated that deaf readers activated word meanings primarily through orthographic representations, but they also appeared to activate word meanings through visemic representations in late error recovery processes. Examining the influence of reading fluency level on error recovery processes, we found that, in comparison to deaf readers with lower reading fluency levels, those with higher reading fluency levels could more quickly resolve homophonic and orthographic errors in the measures of gaze duration and total reading time, respectively. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications of these findings as they relate to the lexical quality hypothesis and the dual-route cascaded model of reading by deaf adults.