How reading mode, expertise, and disorders affect phonological and semantic processing in reading: investigations using eye movements during silent and oral reading, comparing developing, deaf, dyslexic, and normal readers, making use of special properties of the Chinese writing system.

• Applicant: Dr. Jochen Laubrock
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2014 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 251103812

We aim at investigating phonological and semantic processing in silent and oral reading, comparing skilled, developing, dyslexic, and deaf readers, using eye movement measures. We will compare (a) deaf, dyslexic and normal readers; (b) silent and oral reading; (c) younger and older readers in order to gain a better understanding of developmental aspects of the reading process and of problems therein. We will use features of the Chinese and German languages and writing systems that are particularly suited to explore these differences, thereby providing test data for computational models of eye movements during reading and for models of reading aloud.We will research reading dynamics with the following program, focusing on foveal and parafoveal differences in semantic and phonological information processing. We will conduct two series of new studies to address parafoveal processing in oral and silent reading. In the first line, we will collect data from oral and silent reading using the boundary paradigm. We will manipulate the semantic and phonological relatedness of the target word and the preview word. This allows us to test the relative weighting of semantic and phonological information in different reading modes. We predict that phonological PB will be more pronounced in oral than in silent reading, and reading aloud will reduce semantic PB in Chinese. To our knowledge, no published study has used the boundary paradigm to compare parafoveal processing in silent and oral reading. In the second line of studies, we use the moving-window paradigm to investigate the perceptual span in both reading modes. We collect new reading data from different populations such as adults using different languages, normal-developing children, and dyslexic readers. This will allow us to address issues such as the relative importance of parafoveal information and the attentional span in normal children and dyslexics. Furthermore, readers of Chinese script tend to have faster access to semantics than to phonology, whereas readers of a fairly transparent alphabetic orthography such as German tend to have faster access to phonology than to semantics. By comparing the perceptual span in oral and silent reading of matched material between languages we hope to further investigate language differences in oral and silent reading and learn about whether and how the relative weighting of semantics and phonology in different scripts supports lexical and sublexical processing.Besides these two new series of research, we will also collect data from deaf readers, aiming at testing how they use the phonetic radicals of Chinese compound characters. By testing phonetic combinability and consistency effects, we investigate whether the phonetic radical is used phonologically or orthographically during lexical access. By testing the semantic combinability and phonetic consistency effects we investigate whether the phonetic radical can be used semantically.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Persons: Professor Martin Fischer; Professor Reinhold Kliegl, Ph.D.