Below are brief descriptions of my recent lines of research, and references to some of the associated publications.
Why are predictable words easier to read?
When a word is predictable from its context, a reader’s eyes spend relatively little time on it, and are more likely to skip it altogether. But why, exactly? Do we predict a specific upcoming word? Do we broadly ‘pre-activate’ words that may be related to the context? And what stage of visual word recognition is made easier when a word is predictable? I have tried to answer these questions using a range of methodologies. From 2017-2021, this work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS 1732008).
Burnsky, J., Kretzschmar, F., Mayer, E., Sanders, L., & Staub, A. (2023). The influence of predictability, visual contrast, and preview validity on eye movements and N400 amplitude: Co-registration evidence that the N400 reflects late processes. Language, Cognition, & Neuroscience, 38, 821-842.
Staub, A. (2021). How reliable are individual differences in eye movements in reading? Journal of Memory and Language, 116, 104190.
Staub, A. (2020). Do effects of visual contrast and font difficulty on readers’ eye movements interact with effects of word frequency or predictability? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 46, 1235-1251.
Staub, A., & Goddard, K. (2019). The role of preview validity in predictability and frequency effects on eye movements in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45, 110-127.
Frisson, S., Harvey, D. R., & Staub, A. (2017). No prediction error cost in reading: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 95, 200-214.
Staub, A. (2015). The effect of lexical predictability on eye movements in reading: Critical review and theoretical interpretation. Language & Linguistics Compass, 9, 311-327.
Staub, A., Grant, M., Astheimer, L., & Cohen, A. (2015). The influence of cloze probability and item constraint on cloze task response time. Journal of Memory and Language, 82, 1-17.
How do speakers and comprehenders compute agreement?
Speakers often produce sentences like The key to the cabinets are on the table. Here the verb is plural, apparently agreeing with the wrong noun: cabinets, rather than key. Using response time paradigms and eyetracking, we have been exploring what underlies these errors. We have advanced the idea that a number of superficially similar kinds of agreement errors actually have distinct causes. We have also argued against the view that memory retrieval difficulty is what underlies these errors.
Foppolo, F., & Staub, A. (2020). The puzzle of number agreement with disjunction. Cognition, 198, 104161.
Hammerly, C., Staub, A., & Dillon, B. (2019). The grammaticality asymmetry in agreement attraction reflects response bias: Experimental and modeling evidence. Cognitive Psychology, 110, 70-104.
Keung, L., & Staub, A. (2018). Variable agreement with coordinate subjects is not a form of agreement attraction. Journal of Memory and Language, 103, 1-18.
Dillon, B., Staub, A., Levy, J., & Clifton, C., Jr. (2017). Which noun phrases is this verb supposed to agree with? Object agreement in American English. Language, 93, 65-96.
Why do readers sometimes fail to notice word omissions, repetitions, and transpositions?
Readers frequently fail to notice ‘obvious’ errors such as a repeated function words (e.g., the the). How does this happen? Do we simply fail to ‘see’ the error, or do we ‘see’ it (at some level) but then unconsciously ‘correct’ the error before it reaches conscious awareness? We have been investigating this question by examining what readers’ eyes do when they notice, and fail to notice, various kinds of errors.
Huang, K.-J., & Staub, A. (2023). The transposed-word effect does not require parallel word processing: Failure to notice transpositions with serial presentation of words. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 30, 393-400.
Huang, K.-J., & Staub, A. (2021). Why do readers fail to notice word transpositions, omissions, and repetitions? A review of recent evidence and theory. Language and Linguistics Compass, 15, e12434.
Huang, K.-J., & Staub, A. (2021). Using eye tracking to investigate failure to notice word transpositions in reading. Cognition, 216, 104868.
Staub, A., Dodge, S., & Cohen. A. (2019). Failure to notice function word repetitions and omissions in reading: Are eye movements to blame? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26, 340-346.
How do readers comprehend complex relative clause structures in real time?
Sentences like The man that the salesman ignored left the store are notoriously hard to understand. There are many different accounts of why this might be the case, some emphasizing the role that memory plays in the course of sentence processing, and some emphasizing the role played by the comprehender’s expectations for how a sentence is likely to continue. We have been using the fine details of readers’ eye movements to evaluate the predictions of these accounts.
Konrad, I., Burattin, M., Cecchetto, C., Foppollo, F., Staub, A., & Donati, C. (2021). Avoiding gaps in Romance: Evidence for a structural parsing principle from Italian and French. Syntax, 24, 191-223.
Staub, A., Foppolo, F., Donati, C., & Cecchetto, C. (2018). Relative clause avoidance: Evidence for a structural parsing principle. Journal of Memory and Language, 98, 26-44.
Staub, A., Dillon, B., and Clifton, C., Jr. (2017). The matrix verb as a source of comprehension difficulty in object relative sentences. Cognitive Science, 41, 1353-1376.