Dr. Aparna Pandey | IIT Bhubaneswar (original) (raw)

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Papers by Dr. Aparna Pandey

Eye movement patterns in reading vary across languages depending upon the grain size and transpar... more Eye movement patterns in reading vary across languages depending upon the grain size and transparency of the orthography. We studied eye movements in reading Kannada akshara, an alphasyllabary used in South India. Kannada is a very transparent orthography in which the complexity of script layout of orthographic syllables, called akshara, increases when vowel ligatures or more consonants are incorporated into them. There are three levels of such akshara complexity in Kannada: akshara representing vowel alone or a consonant with inherent shwa (basic letters), akshara representing consonant and vowel ligature combination, and akshara representing conjunct consonants and vowel combination. We recorded eye movement patterns from 51 children-17 typically developing (TD), 17 with reading disability (RD) and 17 reading-level-matched typically developing readers (RL) when reading sentences made of different types of akshara. The results showed that the visual-orthographic complexity of akshara in conjunct consonant form increased processing difficulty. The effect was more pronounced in the RD group.

We investigated whether levels of reading ability attained through formal literacy are related to... more We investigated whether levels of reading ability attained through formal literacy are related to anticipatory language-mediated eye movements. Indian low and high literates listened to simple spoken sentences containing a target word (e.g., "door") while at the same time looking at a visual display of four objects (a target, i.e. the door, and three distractors). The spoken sentences were constructed in such a way that participants could use semantic, associative, and syntactic information from adjectives and particles (preceding the critical noun) to anticipate the visual target objects. High literates started to shift their eye gaze to the target objects well before target word onset. In the low literacy group this shift of eye gaze occurred only when the target noun (i.e. "door") was heard, more than a second later. Our findings suggest that formal literacy may be important for the fine-tuning of languagemediated anticipatory mechanisms, abilities which proficient language users can then exploit for other cognitive activities such as spoken language-mediated eye gaze. In the conclusion, we discuss three potential mechanisms of how reading acquisition and practice may contribute to the differences in predictive spoken language processing between low and high literates.

South and Southeast Asian Psycholinguistics, 2013

Journal of Eye Movement Research, Mar 15, 2012

We investigated whether levels of reading ability attained through formal literacy are related to... more We investigated whether levels of reading ability attained through formal literacy are related to anticipatory language-mediated eye movements. Indian low and high literates listened to simple spoken sentences containing a target word (e.g., "door") while at the same time looking at a visual display of four objects (a target, i.e. the door, and three distractors). The spoken sentences were constructed in such a way that participants could use semantic, associative, and syntactic information from adjectives and particles (preceding the critical noun) to anticipate the visual target objects. High literates started to shift their eye gaze to the target objects well before target word onset. In the low literacy group this shift of eye gaze occurred only when the target noun (i.e. "door") was heard, more than a second later. Our findings suggest that formal literacy may be important for the fine-tuning of languagemediated anticipatory mechanisms, abilities which proficient language users can then exploit for other cognitive activities such as spoken language-mediated eye gaze. In the conclusion, we discuss three potential mechanisms of how reading acquisition and practice may contribute to the differences in predictive spoken language processing between low and high literates.

South and Southeast Asian Psycholinguistics, 2013

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Reading and Writing, 2011

The scrambling complexity hypothesis based on working memory or locality accounts as well as synt... more The scrambling complexity hypothesis based on working memory or locality accounts as well as syntactic accounts have proposed that processing a scrambled structure is difficult. However, the locus of this difficulty in sentence processing remains debatable. Several studies on multiple languages have explored the effect of scrambling on sentence processing and not all languages have shown an advantage for the canonical word order. Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we studied the effect of scrambling on semantic anomaly detection in Hindi sentence comprehension employing three word order types. Reading times on critical verbs, judgment latency, and error rates showed significant effect of word order type. The results further revealed significant interactions between word order and anomaly type. The patterns of results suggest that the canonical word order does not necessarily have a processing advantage in terms of speed and accuracy over non-canonical orders and do not provide support to sentence processing accounts that assume an advantage for canonical structures. The results indicate that processing speed depends on the distance between the subject and the verb, thus supporting a locality dependent working memory based model of sentence processing. The results provide evidence for the role of specific cognitive processes in Hindi sentence processing with further implications for language and literacy acquisition in Hindi.

Leprosy review, Jan 1, 2006

Eye movement patterns in reading vary across languages depending upon the grain size and transpar... more Eye movement patterns in reading vary across languages depending upon the grain size and transparency of the orthography. We studied eye movements in reading Kannada akshara, an alphasyllabary used in South India. Kannada is a very transparent orthography in which the complexity of script layout of orthographic syllables, called akshara, increases when vowel ligatures or more consonants are incorporated into them. There are three levels of such akshara complexity in Kannada: akshara representing vowel alone or a consonant with inherent shwa (basic letters), akshara representing consonant and vowel ligature combination, and akshara representing conjunct consonants and vowel combination. We recorded eye movement patterns from 51 children-17 typically developing (TD), 17 with reading disability (RD) and 17 reading-level-matched typically developing readers (RL) when reading sentences made of different types of akshara. The results showed that the visual-orthographic complexity of akshara in conjunct consonant form increased processing difficulty. The effect was more pronounced in the RD group.

We investigated whether levels of reading ability attained through formal literacy are related to... more We investigated whether levels of reading ability attained through formal literacy are related to anticipatory language-mediated eye movements. Indian low and high literates listened to simple spoken sentences containing a target word (e.g., "door") while at the same time looking at a visual display of four objects (a target, i.e. the door, and three distractors). The spoken sentences were constructed in such a way that participants could use semantic, associative, and syntactic information from adjectives and particles (preceding the critical noun) to anticipate the visual target objects. High literates started to shift their eye gaze to the target objects well before target word onset. In the low literacy group this shift of eye gaze occurred only when the target noun (i.e. "door") was heard, more than a second later. Our findings suggest that formal literacy may be important for the fine-tuning of languagemediated anticipatory mechanisms, abilities which proficient language users can then exploit for other cognitive activities such as spoken language-mediated eye gaze. In the conclusion, we discuss three potential mechanisms of how reading acquisition and practice may contribute to the differences in predictive spoken language processing between low and high literates.

South and Southeast Asian Psycholinguistics, 2013

Journal of Eye Movement Research, Mar 15, 2012

We investigated whether levels of reading ability attained through formal literacy are related to... more We investigated whether levels of reading ability attained through formal literacy are related to anticipatory language-mediated eye movements. Indian low and high literates listened to simple spoken sentences containing a target word (e.g., "door") while at the same time looking at a visual display of four objects (a target, i.e. the door, and three distractors). The spoken sentences were constructed in such a way that participants could use semantic, associative, and syntactic information from adjectives and particles (preceding the critical noun) to anticipate the visual target objects. High literates started to shift their eye gaze to the target objects well before target word onset. In the low literacy group this shift of eye gaze occurred only when the target noun (i.e. "door") was heard, more than a second later. Our findings suggest that formal literacy may be important for the fine-tuning of languagemediated anticipatory mechanisms, abilities which proficient language users can then exploit for other cognitive activities such as spoken language-mediated eye gaze. In the conclusion, we discuss three potential mechanisms of how reading acquisition and practice may contribute to the differences in predictive spoken language processing between low and high literates.

South and Southeast Asian Psycholinguistics, 2013

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Reading and Writing, 2011

The scrambling complexity hypothesis based on working memory or locality accounts as well as synt... more The scrambling complexity hypothesis based on working memory or locality accounts as well as syntactic accounts have proposed that processing a scrambled structure is difficult. However, the locus of this difficulty in sentence processing remains debatable. Several studies on multiple languages have explored the effect of scrambling on sentence processing and not all languages have shown an advantage for the canonical word order. Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we studied the effect of scrambling on semantic anomaly detection in Hindi sentence comprehension employing three word order types. Reading times on critical verbs, judgment latency, and error rates showed significant effect of word order type. The results further revealed significant interactions between word order and anomaly type. The patterns of results suggest that the canonical word order does not necessarily have a processing advantage in terms of speed and accuracy over non-canonical orders and do not provide support to sentence processing accounts that assume an advantage for canonical structures. The results indicate that processing speed depends on the distance between the subject and the verb, thus supporting a locality dependent working memory based model of sentence processing. The results provide evidence for the role of specific cognitive processes in Hindi sentence processing with further implications for language and literacy acquisition in Hindi.

Leprosy review, Jan 1, 2006