Developing attention skills allow children to parse their complex world by orienting to a subset of especially salient or meaningful inputs. Infants and children are biased to orient to faces and have difficulty ignoring faces when they appear as distractors. Although these past findings suggest that faces are more salient than nonsocial stimuli,…

Much research has applied automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems to English writing instruction; however, understanding how students internalize and apply this feedback to reduce writing errors is difficult, largely due to the personal and private nature of this process. Therefore, this research utilized eye-tracking technology to explore the…

The current study examined eye movement control in autistic (ASD) children. Simple targets were presented in isolation, or with central, parafoveal, or peripheral distractors synchronously. Sixteen children with ASD (47-81 months) and nineteen age and IQ matched typically developing children were instructed to look to the target as accurately and…

Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused difficulties in conducting face-to-face classes in schools; instead, conducting online classes has been encouraged. However, the effect of the teacher's screen presence on students' performance is unclear. This study (n = 60) aimed to explore whether students' gaze during the task could predict their…

Facilitated identification of predictable words during online reading has been attributed to the generation of predictions about upcoming words. But highly predictable words are relatively infrequent in natural texts, raising questions about the utility and ubiquity of anticipatory prediction strategies. This study investigated the contribution of…

This article investigates how students with mathematical difficulties (MD) differ from typically developing (TD) students in enumeration processes of small sets of objects (of 1 up to 9 dots). We present a study with 20 fifth-grade students of which ten were found to have MD in initial diagnostics. The students were supposed to exactly enumerate…

Spelling errors are typically thought of as an "effect" of a word's weak orthographic representation in an individual mind. What if existence of spelling errors is a partial "cause" of effortful orthographic learning and word recognition? We selected words that had homophonic substandard spelling variants of varying frequency…

In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the processing of information about phonological consistency of Chinese phonograms during sentence reading. In Experiment 1, we adopted the error disruption paradigm in silent reading and found significant effects of phonological consistency and homophony in the foveal vision, but only in a late…

We investigated whether readers use the low-level cue of proper noun capitalization in the parafovea to infer syntactic category, and whether this results in an early update of the representation of a sentence's syntactic structure. Participants read sentences containing either a subject relative or object relative clause, in which the relative…

We investigated toddlers' phonological representations of common vowel-initial words that can take on multiple surface forms in the input. In French, liaison consonants are inserted and are syllabified as onsets in subsequent vowel-initial words, for example, petit /t/ éléphant [little elephant]. We aimed to better understand the impact on…

Perspective-taking plays an important role in daily life, allowing consideration of other people's perspectives and viewpoints. This study used a large sample of 265 community-based participants (aged 20-86 years) to examine changes in perspective-taking abilities--a component of "Theory of Mind"--across adulthood, and how these changes…

This study adopted eye movement miscue analysis research method to examine and illustrate the cognitive and psychological processes of meaning construction and error detection in reading Chinese. Eighteen Taiwanese grade five elementary students read a short Chinese text with six embedded errors. Results show that like earlier studies, only about…

The current study investigated whether shared phonology across languages activates cross-language meaning when reading in context. Eighty-five bilinguals read English sentences while their eye movements were tracked. Critical sentences contained English members of English-French interlingual homophone pairs (e.g., "mow"; French homophone…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

The time required to determine the larger of 2 digits decreases with their numerical distance, and, for a given distance, increases with their magnitude (Moyer & Landauer, 1967). One detailed quantitative framework to account for these effects is provided by random walk models. These chronometric models describe how number-related noisy…