October 11, 2019 | 11:30AM
Cobb 302
Adrian Staub (UMass Amherst) will discuss his work "Understanding the effect of lexical predictability in reading":
Understanding the effect of lexical predictability in reading
Context exerts a robust influence on how long it takes to read a word: As a word’s predictability increases, reading time decreases monotonically. In this talk, I will discuss our ongoing attempts to answer the question of exactly what aspects or stages of lexical processing are facilitated by predictability. One central approach to this problem has involved exploring potential interactions in the eye movement record between predictability and variables such as word frequency, stimulus quality, and parafoveal preview. This work has converged on the conclusion that predictability facilitates lexical processing primarily by facilitating very early stages of visual or orthographic processing, rather than later stages of lexical or conceptual access. However, this conclusion is difficult to reconcile with predictability's modulation of the N400 component in ERP studies. I will discuss current work that addresses this issue by simultaneously assessing the effect of predictability on eye movements and ERPs in a co-registration paradigm.