Search Results (12)

This study investigated how word frequency, word length and visual complexity affect lexical processing during Chinese sentence oral reading, and whether these effects differ between developing and skilled readers. Third-grade children and adults read sentences aloud while their eye movements were recorded with an EyeLink 1000 Plus eye-tracker. Linear mixed-effects models revealed three main findings. First, children showed larger word-frequency and visual-complexity effects than adults, indicating less efficient lexical processing in developing readers. Second, word length moderated the effects of word frequency and visual complexity. Frequency effects were amplified for two-character words, whereas visual-complexity effects were stronger for single-character words on early measures and followed a different pattern on some late measures. Third, at the sentence level, children exhibited shorter forward saccades, more regressions and longer total reading times than adults. These findings provide developmental evidence for the visual and linguistic constraints hypothesis and show how visual recognition and overt phonological output jointly shape foveal lexical processing in Chinese oral reading. Full article

Background/Objective: In late adulthood, the increasing prevalence of diabetes overlaps with the highest prevalence of postural instability. A cross-sectional study was designed to explore the combined influence of age, gender, history of COVID-19 quadriceps strength, and Body Mass Index (B.M.I.) on the postural stability of adults with/without diabetes, under a variety of sensory conditions. Methods: A total of 263 adults aged 21 to 82 years old accepted to participate, 99 with and 164 without diabetes. They had no history of vestibular/otology/neurology/autoimmune/orthopedic disease or proliferative retinopathy/severe renal dysfunction/traumatic injury. After clinical and vestibular evaluations, postural sway was recorded on hard/soft surface, eyes open/closed, and without/with 30° neck extension. Bivariate analysis and repeated measures multivariate analysis of covariance were performed with 0.05 significance. Results: In the two groups, two thirds of the participants had excess weight and almost half had history of COVID-19. Overall conditions, gender and diabetes were the main factors contributing to sway area (multiple R = 0.28–0.31, p ≤ 0.001) and to sway length (multiple R = 0.34–0.47, p ≤ 0.00001). Compared to adults without diabetes, in those with diabetes, the age was not related to sway measurements; with contribution to sway from history of COVID-19 and quadriceps strength, and decreased contribution of the study variables to both the anterior–posterior position of the center of pressure and ankle movement (velocity as a function of the anterior–posterior position of the center of pressure) (p > 0.05). Conclusions: Diabetes may interfere with the influence of individual cofactors contributing to postural sway, including decreased influence of age and reduced ankle movement. A history of mild–moderate COVID-19 may have influence on postural control in varied sensory conditions. Full article

This study utilized the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm to examine age-related changes in parafoveal processing during Chinese sentence reading. A community sample of 65 older readers and 68 younger readers from Hong Kong read 130 sentences while their eye movements were recorded. In each sentence, an invisible boundary was placed just before a critical target word. Before the readers’ eye gaze crossed the boundary, a parafoveal preview was presented in the position of the target word. The preview could be identical, orthographically related, phonologically related, semantically related, or unrelated to the first character of the target word. Once the eye gaze passed the boundary, the preview characters changed to the target. For the younger readers, the related parafoveal previews facilitated the subsequent foveal processing of the target compared to the unrelated previews across early and late eye movement measures. In contrast, the older readers demonstrated a reduced identical preview benefit in early eye movement measures. They also showed benefits in other preview conditions only in later measures. These results suggest that older Chinese readers can extract linguistic information from parafoveal vision despite reduced visual acuity. However, the efficiency of parafoveal processing is reduced, potentially due to slower processing speed and less efficient spreading activation within the lexical network. Full article

Oculomotor reading behavior is influenced by both universal factors, like the “big three” of word length, frequency, and contextual predictability, and language-specific factors, such as script and grammar. The aim of this study was to examine the influence of the “big three” factors on L2 reading focusing on a typologically distant L1/L2 pair with dramatic differences in script and grammar. A total of 41 native Chinese-speaking learners of Russian (levels A2-B2) and 40 native Russian speakers read a corpus of 90 Russian sentences for comprehension. Their eye movements were recorded with EyeLink 1000+. We analyzed both early (gaze duration and skipping rate) and late (regression rate and rereading time) eye movement measures. As expected, the “big three” effects influenced oculomotor behavior in both L1 and L2 readers, being more pronounced for L2, but substantial differences were also revealed. Word frequency in L1 reading primarily influenced early processing stages, whereas in L2 reading it remained significant in later stages as well. Predictability had an immediate effect on skipping rates in L1 reading, while L2 readers only exhibited it in late measures. Word length was the only factor that interacted with L2 language exposure which demonstrated adjustment to alphabetic script and polymorphemic word structure. Our findings provide new insights into the processing challenges of L2 readers with typologically distant L1 backgrounds. Full article

Background/Objectives: Accurately predicting the arrival position of a moving target is essential in sports and daily life. While predictive saccades are known to enhance performance, the neural mechanisms underlying the timing of these strategies remain unclear. This study investigated how the timing of saccadic strategies—executed early versus late—affects cortical activity patterns, as measured by electroencephalography (EEG). Methods: Sixteen participants performed a task requiring them to predict the arrival position and timing of a parabolically moving target that became occluded midway through its trajectory. Based on eye movement behavior, participants were classified into an Early Saccade Strategy Group (SSG) or a Late SSG. EEG signals were analyzed in the low beta band (13–15 Hz) using the Hilbert transform. Group differences in eye movements and EEG activity were statistically assessed. Results: No significant group differences were observed in final position or response timing errors. However, time-series analysis showed that the Early SSG achieved earlier and more accurate eye positioning. EEG results revealed greater low beta activity in the Early SSG at electrode sites FC6 and P8, corresponding to the frontal eye field (FEF) and middle temporal (MT) visual area, respectively. Conclusions: Early execution of predictive saccades was associated with enhanced cortical activity in visuomotor and motion-sensitive regions. These findings suggest that early engagement of saccadic strategies supports more efficient visuospatial processing, with potential applications in dynamic physical tasks and digitally mediated performance domains such as eSports. Full article

Objectives: The aim of this study was to determine the performance of cognitive and psychomotor functions in patients after ischemic stroke, taking into account the effectiveness of early and late rehabilitation. Methods: The study included 86 patients with ischemic stroke hospitalized in the Neurological Rehabilitation Unit. The patients were divided into two groups according to the timing of rehabilitation, considering early rehabilitation which started within 30 days of hospital discharge (56 patients), and late rehabilitation which started after 30 days of hospital discharge (30 patients). Cognitive and psychomotor functions were measured in all the study patients using the Integrated System for the Measurement of Psychophysiological Variables called Polypsychograph, including tests assessing memory, attention, eye–hand coordination, and reaction speed. The measurements were repeated after 21 days of post-stroke rehabilitation. Results: Early rehabilitation led to significant improvements in most of the parameters studied, including memory, attention, speed of thinking, and precision of movement. Late rehabilitation was followed by an improvement in the results of the indicators studied to a lesser extent than the early rehabilitation. Improvements in temporal and qualitative parameters were observed in both groups of patients undergoing early and late rehabilitation. Conclusions: In patients after ischemic stroke, early rehabilitation improved cognitive and psychomotor performance to a greater extent than late rehabilitation. Full article

Substance use disorder (SUD) significantly impacts public health, economics, and legal systems worldwide. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) was initially developed in the late 1980s as a therapeutic approach for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), using bilateral stimulation to integrate traumatic memories with calming physiological responses. However, the effectiveness of EMDR in treating SUD remains unclear. This study aims to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the impact of EMDR therapy on craving reduction in individuals with SUD. The search was conducted using databases such as PubMed and Web of Science, focusing on studies that measured craving and employed EMDR interventions. Both random and fixed effects models were used to pool effect sizes, utilizing an R software meta-package (R-4.4.1). The study adhered to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The results indicated a significant reduction in cravings among patients undergoing EMDR therapy. Specifically, under the fixed effect model, the standardized mean difference (SMD) was −0.866 with a 95% confidence interval ranging from −1.121 to −0.611 (z = −6.66, p < 0.0001). These findings may demonstrate the significant efficacy of EMDR therapy in decreasing cravings in people with SUD. Full article

In this narrative review, we focus on the role of quantitative EEG technology in the diagnosis and prognosis of patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome and minimally conscious state. This paper is divided into two main parts, i.e., diagnosis and prognosis, each consisting of three subsections, namely, (i) resting-state EEG, including spectral power, functional connectivity, dynamic functional connectivity, graph theory, microstates and nonlinear measurements, (ii) sleep patterns, including rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, slow-wave sleep and sleep spindles and (iii) evoked potentials, including the P300, mismatch negativity, the N100, the N400 late positive component and others. Finally, we summarize our findings and conclude that QEEG is a useful tool when it comes to defining the diagnosis and prognosis of DOC patients. Full article

This study aims to analyse how translation experts from the German department of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) identify and correct different error categories in neural machine translated texts (NMT) and their post-edited versions (NMTPE). The term translation expert encompasses translator, post-editor as well as revisor. Even though we focus on neural machine-translated segments, translator and post-editor are used synonymously because of the combined workflow using CAT-Tools as well as machine translation. Only the distinction between post-editor, which refers to a DGT translation expert correcting the neural machine translation output, and revisor, which refers to a DGT translation expert correcting the post-edited version of the neural machine translation output, is important and made clear whenever relevant. Using an automatic error annotation tool and the more fine-grained manual error annotation framework to identify characteristic error categories in the DGT texts, a corpus analysis revealed that quality assurance measures by post-editors and revisors of the DGT are most often necessary for lexical errors. More specifically, the corpus analysis showed that, if post-editors correct mistranslations, terminology or stylistic errors in an NMT sentence, revisors are likely to correct the same error type in the same post-edited sentence, suggesting that the DGT experts were being primed by the NMT output. Subsequently, we designed a controlled eye-tracking and key-logging experiment to compare participants’ eye movements for test sentences containing the three identified error categories (mistranslations, terminology or stylistic errors) and for control sentences without errors. We examined the three error types’ effect on early (first fixation durations, first pass durations) and late eye movement measures (e.g., total reading time and regression path durations). Linear mixed-effects regression models predict what kind of behaviour of the DGT experts is associated with the correction of different error types during the post-editing process. Full article

Niemann-Pick Disease, type C1 (NPC1) is a rapidly progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterized by cholesterol sequestration within late endosomes and lysosomes, for which no reliable imaging marker exists for prognostication and management. Cerebellar volume deficits are found to correlate with disease severity and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of the corpus callosum and brainstem, which has shown that microstructural disorganization is associated with NPC1 severity. This study investigates the utility of cerebellar DTI in clinical severity assessment. We hypothesize that cerebellar volume, fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) negatively correlate with NIH NPC neurological severity score (NNSS) and motor severity subscores. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was obtained for thirty-nine NPC1 subjects, ages 1–21.9 years (mean = 11.1, SD = 6.1). Using an atlas-based automated approach, the cerebellum of each patient was measured for FA, MD and volume. Additionally, each patient was given an NNSS. Decreased cerebellar FA and volume, and elevated MD correlate with higher NNSS. The cognition subscore and motor subscores for eye movement, ambulation, speech, swallowing, and fine motor skills were also statistically significant. Microstructural disorganization negatively correlated with motor severity in subjects. Additionally, Miglustat therapy correlated with lower severity scores across ranges of FA, MD and volume in all regions except the inferior peduncle, where a paradoxical effect was observed at high FA values. These findings suggest that DTI is a promising prognostication tool. Full article

This is the first attempt at characterizing reading difculty in Hindi using naturall occurring sentences. We created the Potsdam-Allahabad Hindi Eyetracking Corpus by recording eye-movement data from 30 participants at the University of Allahabad. India. The target stimuli were 153 sentences selected from the beta version of the Hindi-Urdu treebank, We find that word- or low-level predictors (syllable length unigram and bigram frequency) affect first-pass reading times, regression path dura. tion, total reading time, and outgoing saccade length. An increase in syllable length results in longer fixations, and an increase in word unigram and bigram frequency leads to shorter fixations. Longer syllable length and higher frequency lead to longei outgoing saccades, We also find that two predictors of sentence comprehension difi culty, integration and storage cost, have an effect on reading dificulty. Integration cost (Gibson, 2000) was approximated by calculating the distance (in words) between a dependent and head; and storage cost (Gibson, 2000), which measures dificulty of maintaining predictions, was estimated by counting the number of predicted heads at each point in the sentence. We find that integration cost mainly affects outgoing saccade length, and storage cost aflects total reading times and outgoing saccade length, Thus, word-level predictors have an efect in both early and late measures of reading time, while predictors of sentence comprehension dificulty tend to affect later measures. This is, to our knowledge, the first demonstration using eye-tracking that both integration and storage cost infuence reading dificulty. Full article

The surprisal of a word on a probabilistic grammar constitutes a promising complexity metric for human sentence comprehension difficulty. Using two different grammar types, surprisal is shown to have an effect on fixation durations and regression probabilities in a sample of German readers’ eye movements, the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. A linear mixed-effects model was used to quantify the effect of surprisal while taking into account unigram frequency and bigram frequency (transitional probability), word length, and empirically-derived word predictability; the so-called “early” and “late” measures of processing difficulty both showed an effect of surprisal. Surprisal is also shown to have a small but statistically non-significant effect on empirically-derived predictability itself. This work thus demonstrates the importance of including parsing costs as a predictor of comprehension difficulty in models of reading, and suggests that a simple identification of syntactic parsing costs with early measures and late measures with durations of post-syntactic events may be difficult to uphold. Full article