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Automatic Lexical Access in Visual Modality: Eye-Tracking Evidence

Language processing has been suggested to be partially automatic, with some studies suggesting full automaticity and attention independence of at least early neural stages of language comprehension, in particular, lexical access. Existing neurophysiological evidence has demonstrated early lexically...

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Autores principales: Stupina, Ekaterina, Myachykov, Andriy, Shtyrov, Yury
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6176043/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30333775
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01847
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author Stupina, Ekaterina
Myachykov, Andriy
Shtyrov, Yury
author_facet Stupina, Ekaterina
Myachykov, Andriy
Shtyrov, Yury
author_sort Stupina, Ekaterina
collection PubMed
description Language processing has been suggested to be partially automatic, with some studies suggesting full automaticity and attention independence of at least early neural stages of language comprehension, in particular, lexical access. Existing neurophysiological evidence has demonstrated early lexically specific brain responses (enhanced activation for real words) to orthographic stimuli presented parafoveally even under the condition of withdrawn attention. These studies, however, did not control participants’ eye movements leaving a possibility that they may have foveated the stimuli, leading to overt processing. To address this caveat, we recorded eye movements to words, pseudowords, and non-words presented parafoveally for a short duration while participants performed a dual non-linguistic feature detection task (color combination) foveally, in the focus of their visual attention. Our results revealed very few saccades to the orthographic stimuli or even to their previous locations. However, analysis of post-experimental recall and recognition performance showed above-chance memory performance for the linguistic stimuli. These results suggest that partial lexical access may indeed take place in the presence of an unrelated demanding task and in the absence of overt attention to the linguistic stimuli. As such, our data further inform automatic and largely attention-independent theories of lexical access.
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spelling pubmed-61760432018-10-17 Automatic Lexical Access in Visual Modality: Eye-Tracking Evidence Stupina, Ekaterina Myachykov, Andriy Shtyrov, Yury Front Psychol Psychology Language processing has been suggested to be partially automatic, with some studies suggesting full automaticity and attention independence of at least early neural stages of language comprehension, in particular, lexical access. Existing neurophysiological evidence has demonstrated early lexically specific brain responses (enhanced activation for real words) to orthographic stimuli presented parafoveally even under the condition of withdrawn attention. These studies, however, did not control participants’ eye movements leaving a possibility that they may have foveated the stimuli, leading to overt processing. To address this caveat, we recorded eye movements to words, pseudowords, and non-words presented parafoveally for a short duration while participants performed a dual non-linguistic feature detection task (color combination) foveally, in the focus of their visual attention. Our results revealed very few saccades to the orthographic stimuli or even to their previous locations. However, analysis of post-experimental recall and recognition performance showed above-chance memory performance for the linguistic stimuli. These results suggest that partial lexical access may indeed take place in the presence of an unrelated demanding task and in the absence of overt attention to the linguistic stimuli. As such, our data further inform automatic and largely attention-independent theories of lexical access. Frontiers Media S.A. 2018-10-02 /pmc/articles/PMC6176043/ /pubmed/30333775 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01847 Text en Copyright © 2018 Stupina, Myachykov and Shtyrov. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Stupina, Ekaterina
Myachykov, Andriy
Shtyrov, Yury
Automatic Lexical Access in Visual Modality: Eye-Tracking Evidence
title Automatic Lexical Access in Visual Modality: Eye-Tracking Evidence
title_full Automatic Lexical Access in Visual Modality: Eye-Tracking Evidence
title_fullStr Automatic Lexical Access in Visual Modality: Eye-Tracking Evidence
title_full_unstemmed Automatic Lexical Access in Visual Modality: Eye-Tracking Evidence
title_short Automatic Lexical Access in Visual Modality: Eye-Tracking Evidence
title_sort automatic lexical access in visual modality: eye-tracking evidence
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6176043/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30333775
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01847
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