Emotional Context and Predictability in Naturalistic Reading Aloud

A robust experimental literature has found that word frequency and lexical valence contribute to visual word processing at the level of the individual word. Extensions of this literature to simplified sentences have essentially corroborated single-word findings, albeit with important influences of the unfolding discourse context, which may strengthen or attenuate single-word effects. This study sought to extend current knowledge one step further, beyond stand-alone sentences or sentence pairs, by investigating how word frequency and lexical valence, along with their interactions, influence oral reading performance for multisentence stimuli in a naturalistic context. Lexical features were averaged over short passages of text, which were presented to participants on-screen simultaneously, and performance was assessed as reading speed, in words per second. Overall, we find that the same patterns emerge for multisentence oral reading as in the prior literature: strong frequency effects that benefit higher-frequency content, a positivity bias that increases reading speed for more positive content, and an important interaction that disfavors relatively more negative (less positive), high-frequency content. We discuss these findings in light of possible interpretations based on associative connectivity in the mental lexicon, as well as oculomotor dynamics during naturalistic reading. Our data suggest that reading speed of multisentence texts is a viable alternative, and one that offers enhanced ecological validity, for investigations of visual word processing dynamics.

Automated summary

A robust experimental literature has found that word frequency and lexical valence contribute to visual word processing at the level of the individual word. This study extends the previous findings by investigating the influence of word frequency, lexical valence, and their interactions on oral reading performance for multisentence stimuli in a naturalistic context.