Brief articleInvestigating the causes of wrap-up effects: Evidence from eye movements and E–Z Reader
Introduction
Readers tend to spend longer reading sentence- or clause-final words than sentence- or clause-internal words (Aaronson and Scarborough, 1976, Just and Carpenter, 1980, Rayner et al., 1989). This phenomenon is referred to as sentence or clause wrap-up and has traditionally been thought to be due to integrative processing that occurs sentence- or clause-finally, such as the processing involved in relating sentences or clauses and updating a discourse model (Just and Carpenter, 1980, Rayner et al., 2000). Recently however, this classic interpretation of wrap-up effects has been questioned. Hirotani, Frazier, and Rayner (2006) argued that wrap-up effects reflect pauses associated with implicit prosody. Hill and Murray (2000) proposed that they are a low-level hesitation response of the oculomotor system in response to the punctuation and/or longer spacing that often occurs at clause and sentence boundaries.
One way to test the integrative processing hypothesis is to check for an interaction between sentence complexity and wrap-up. If an increase in integrative processing drives wrap-up effects, then sentence complexity and the presence of a punctuation-marked boundary should interact such that wrap-up effects are greater for complex sentences. This interaction could be predicted either because more integrative processing is likely to be off-loaded until the end of a complex than a simple clause, or because complex clauses require more difficult integration. On the other hand, if wrap-up effects reflect implicit prosody or low-level reactions to visual cues then no such interaction would be expected.
Hirotani et al. (2006) reported an eye-tracking experiment testing for such an interaction. Their between-items complexity manipulation varied the presence of a few adjectives, adverbs, and/or prepositional phrases in an initial clause, the critical word of which (fish in the simple condition below) was either clause-internal (1a), clause-final and not comma-marked (1b), clause-final and comma-marked (c), or sentence-final (1d).
Simple
- (1a)
The mother cooked the fish yesterday, after the boy caught it. He was excited.
- (1b)
The mother cooked the fish after the boy caught it. He was excited.
- (1c)
The mother cooked the fish, after the boy caught it. He was excited.
- (1d)
The mother cooked the fish. After the boy caught it he was excited.
Complex
- (2a)
Jeremy prepared the marinade for the venison steaks last night, while…
At the critical region the fish or venison steaks above, first-pass reading measures indicated effects of punctuation/structural boundaries with similar patterns and effect sizes in the simple and complex conditions. Fixations on the critical word were longest in the sentence-final condition, shorter in the comma-marked condition, and shortest in the non-comma-marked clause-final and clause-internal conditions. These results weigh against an interaction between sentence complexity and the presence of a boundary, contrary to the predictions of the integrative processing hypothesis. However, this complexity manipulation may not have been strong enough to modulate wrap-up effects.
The current paper reports an experiment and a computational simulation using the E–Z Reader model of eye movement control in reading (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009). The experiment followed up on Hirotani et al. (2006), but used better-controlled items and a stronger within-items manipulation of sentential complexity. In the simple conditions, the initial clause included a conjunction and an optionally transitive or reciprocal verb (Fig. 1, conditions a–c). In the complex conditions, the conjunction was rearranged as an object cleft (Fig. 1, conditions d–f). Previous research has demonstrated that the verb is a position of extreme complexity in object clefts in which both referents are referred to by name (Gordon et al., 2001, Warren and Gibson, 2005).
The critical word was the verb of the first clause (phoned in Fig. 1). According to the integrative processing hypothesis, the complex conditions should show larger wrap-up effects than the simple conditions because they require more integrative processing, more of which will be off-loaded until the end of the clause or sentence. Warren and Gibson (2005) provide evidence that some integrative processing is delayed until the end of sentences with object cleft structures. In their study, reading time effects of processing complexity were manifest at the cleft verb, dissipated, and then reappeared at a sentence-final word.
All relevant theories predict effects of both complexity and punctuation. However, the magnitude and time course of these effects in the present experiment, as well as their interaction or lack thereof, may help distinguish between theories of wrap-up. Additionally, interpreting the current results within the framework of the E–Z Reader model will allow us to consider potential co-influences of different mechanisms that have been proposed to explain wrap-up and test explicit hypotheses about how increased integrative processing and visual cues like punctuation might influence eye movements in reading.
Section snippets
Participants
Forty-eight undergraduates at the University of Pittsburgh participated for course credit. All were native English speakers with normal or corrected-to-normal (via contact lenses) vision.
Apparatus
An Eyelink 1000 eye-tracker monitored the gaze location of participants’ right eyes during reading. The eye tracker has a spatial resolution better than 30′ arc and a 1000 Hz sample rate. Participants viewed the stimuli binocularly on a monitor 63 cm from their eyes; 3.3 characters equaled approximately 1° of
Results
Two analysis regions were defined. The critical region was the verb in the first sentence (phoned). The post-critical region consisted of the following word (before).
Comprehension rates were high (M = 91%, SD = 5.8%). Approximately 7% of trials were excluded from analysis due to track losses, blinks in or near the critical region, and/or incomplete trials. Fixations shorter than 80 ms that fell within 1.5 characters of another fixation were grouped; other fixations under 80 ms and all fixations over
General discussion
The results of this experiment were inconsistent with the hypothesis that wrap-up effects are solely due to increased integrative processing. Unlike in previous studies (e.g., Rayner et al., 2000, Hill and Murray, 2000), wrap-up effects were reliable as early as the first fixation on the critical word. This implicates a mechanism other than increased integrative processing, because such additional processing would be expected to occur after normal integrative processing and be evident only in
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by NIH grant HD053639 to the first and third authors. Portions of this work were completed while the third author was a fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, Germany. We thank Alison Trude, Sarah Heider, Amanda Virbitsky, and the 2008 CUNY audience.
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