Synonyms provide semantic preview benefit in English

Lack of semantic parafoveal preview benefit in reading revisited.

In contrast to earlier research, evidence for semantic preview benefit in reading has been reported by Hohenstein and Kliegl (Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40, 166-190, 2013) in an alphabetic writing system; they also implied that prior demonstrations of lack of a semantic preview benefit needed to be reexamined. In the present article, we report a rather direct repl...

The semantic and stylistic differentiation of synonyms and near-synonyms

If we want to describe the action of someone who is looking out a window for an extended time, how do we choose between the words gazing, staring, and peering? What exactly is the difference between an argument, a dispute, and a row? In this paper, we describe our research in progress on the problem of lexical choice and the representations of world knowledge and of lexical structure and meanin...

Semantic and plausibility effects on preview benefit during eye fixations in Chinese reading

The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to examine whether high level information affects preview benefit during Chinese reading. In two experiments, readers read sentences with a 1-character target word while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, the semantic relatedness between the target word and the preview word was manipulated so that there were semantically related an...

The Semantic and Stylistic Diierentiation of Synonyms and Near-synonyms

A psychophysical investigation into the preview benefit in visual search

In preview search, half of the distracters are presented ahead of the remaining distracters and the target. Search under these conditions is more efficient than when all the items appear together (Watson & Humphreys, 1997). We investigated the mechanisms contributing to this preview benefit using an orientation discrimination task. In a display of vertical Gabors (all equidistant from fixation)...