Search

Purpose: This study reports on the development of an auditory passage comprehension task for Swedish primary school children of cultural and linguistic diversity. It also reports on their performance on the task in quiet and in noise. Method: Eighty-eight children aged 7-9 years and showing normal hearing participated. The children were divided into three groups based on presumed language exposure: 13 children were categorized as Swedish-speaking monolinguals, 19 children were categorized as simultaneous bilinguals, and 56 children were categorized as sequential bilinguals. No significant difference in working memory capacity was seen between the three language groups. Two passages and associated multiple-choice questions were developed. During development of the passage comprehension task, steps were taken to reduce the impact of culture-specific prior experience and knowledge on performance. This was achieved by using the story grammar principles, universal topics and plots, and simple language that avoided complex or unusual grammatical structures and words. Results: The findings indicate no significant difference between the two passages and similar response distributions. Passage comprehension performance was significantly better in quiet than in noise, regardless of language exposure group. The monolinguals outperformed both simultaneous and sequential bilinguals in both listening conditions. Conclusions: Because the task was designed to minimize the effect of cultural knowledge on auditory passage comprehension, this suggests that compared with monolinguals, both simultaneous and sequential bilinguals have a disadvantage in auditory passage comprehension. As expected, the findings demonstrate that noise has a negative effect on auditory passage comprehension. The magnitude of this effect does not relate to language exposure. The developed auditory passage comprehension task seems suitable for assessing auditory passage comprehension in primary school children of linguistic and cultural diversity.

Audio description (AD) plays a crucial role in making audiovisual media accessible to people with a visual impairment, enhancing their experience and understanding. This study employs an event segmentation task to examine how people without sight perceive and segment narrative events in films with AD, compared to sighted viewers without AD. Two AD versions were utilized, differing in the explicitness of conveyed event boundaries. Results reveal that the participants without sight generally perceived event boundaries similarly to their sighted peers, affirming AD's effectiveness in conveying event structures. However, when key event boundaries were more implicitly expressed, event boundary recognition diminished. Collectively, these findings offer valuable insights into event segmentation processes across sensory modalities. Additionally, they underscore the significance of how AD presents event boundaries, influencing the perception and interpretation of audiovisual media for people with a visual impairment and providing applied insights into event segmentation, multimodal processing, and audiovisual accessibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current debate in mental imagery research revolves around the perceptual and cognitive role of eye movements to "nothing" (Ferreira, Apel, & Henderson, 2008; Richardson, Altmann, Spivey, & Hoover, 2009). While it is established that eye movements are comparable when inspecting a scene (or hearing a scene description) as when visualizing it from memory (Johansson, Holsanova, & Holmqvist, 2006), the exact purpose of these eye movements remains elusive. Are eye movements during recall purely epiphenomenal or do they have a functional purpose? Here we address this question in four experiments where eye movements were prohibited either during the encoding or recall phases. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that maintaining central fixation during visual or auditory encoding, respectively, had no effect on how eye movements were executed during recall (but it did hinder memory retrieval). Thus, oculomotor events during recall are not reinstatements of those produced during encoding. When fixation was restricted during recall, Experiments 3 and 4 revealed that scene recollection was altered and impaired, irrespective of the modality of encoding. The functional role of eye movements during mental visualization is therefore apparent in this perturbation of visuospatial capabilities. (Contains 5 tables and 19 figures.)

In the present study 24 university students read four different texts in four conditions: (1) while listening to music they preferred to listen to while studying; (2) while listening to music they did not prefer to listen to while studying; (3) while listening to a recording of noise from a cafe; and finally (4) in silence. After each text they took a reading-comprehension test. Eye movement data were recorded for all participants in all conditions. A main effect for the reading-comprehension scores revealed that the participants scored significantly lower after they had been listening to the non-preferred music while reading, compared with reading in silence. No significant effects were found between the other conditions. No significant differences between conditions were found for the traditional eye movement measures in reading (fixation duration, saccadic amplitude, regressions, and first-pass and second-pass reading time). It is suggested that this result is a consequence of participants not being aware that their reading processes are disrupted by a non-preferred musical background. They do not make the necessary changes to the processes involved in reading required to compensate for increased cognitive load. The results are discussed in relation to study/reading habits, extraversion, arousal and working memory capacity. (Contains 3 tables and 2 notes.)

In this paper we explored text production differences in an expository text production task between writers who looked mainly at the keyboard and writers who looked mainly at the monitor. Eye-tracking technology and keystroke-logging were combined to systematically describe and define these two groups in respect of the complex interplay between text production and the reading of one's own emerging text. Findings showed that monitor gazers typed significantly faster and were more productive writers. They also read their own text more, and they frequently read in parallel with writing. Analysis of fixation durations suggests that more cognitive processing is in use during reading in parallel with writing than during reading in pauses. Keyboard gazers used the left and right cursor keys significantly more. We suggest that this is because they revised their texts in a much more serial mode than monitor gazers. Finally, analysis of the characteristics of the final texts showed no differences between the groups.

This study provides evidence that eye movements reflect the positions of objects while participants listen to a spoken description, retell a previously heard spoken description, and describe a previously seen picture. This effect is equally strong in retelling from memory, irrespective of whether the original elicitation was spoken or visual. In addition, this effect occurs both while watching a blank white board and while sitting in complete darkness. This study includes 4 experiments. The first 2 experiments measured eye movements of participants looking at a blank white board. Experiment 1 monitors eye movements of participants on 2 occasions: first, when participants listened to a prerecorded spoken scene description; second, when participants were later retelling it from memory. Experiment 2 first monitored eye movements of participants as they studied a complex picture visually, and then later as they described it from memory. The second pair of experiments (Experiments 3 and 4) replicated Experiments 1 and 2 with the only difference being that they were executed in complete darkness. This method of analysis differentiated between eye movements that are categorically correct relative to the positions of the whole eye gaze pattern (global correspondence) and eye movements that are only locally correct (local correspondence). The discussion relates the findings to the current debate on mental imagery.