Bi-directional Lexical Influences during Oral Reading.

Abstract

Although reading aloud is associated with less skilled readers and children, it is an incredibly complex task that recruits multiple processes such as oculomotor, visual, orthographic, phonological, semantic, memory and speech processes. During oral reading, readers’ eyes are typically two words ahead of the voice, suggesting that at any given time, the articulated word differs (N-2) from the fixated word (N). In this study, we investigated the presence of dual task costs on eye movements (i.e., gaze duration) and speech processes (i.e., articulation duration) based on lexical effects of word frequency and length during children’s sentence reading. Our main questions were whether the frequency and length of the articulated word N-2 (speech load) impacted gaze durations of N and whether the same variables for the fixated word N (foveal load) impacted articulation duration of word N-2. The frequency of the word a reader was uttering (N-2) impacted the gaze duration of a concurrently fixated word (N). However, the reverse effect was not significant. That is, the frequency of the fixated word (N) did not significantly impact the time needed to utter word N-2. Findings are discussed in the context of attention allocation during dual tasks and the encapsulation of output processes.