Quantifying the Effects of Word Length, Frequency, and Predictability on Dyslexia
We ask where, and under what conditions, dyslexic reading costs arise in a large-scale naturalistic reading dataset. Using eye-tracking aligned to word-level features (word length, frequency, and predictability), we model how each feature influences dyslexic time costs. We find that all three features robustly change reading times in both typical and dyslexic readers, and that dyslexic readers show stronger sensitivities to each, especially predictability. Counterfactual manipulations of these features substantially narrow the dyslexic-control gap by about one third, with predictability showing the strongest effect, followed by length and frequency. These patterns align with dyslexia theories that posit heightened demands on linguistic working memory and phonological encoding, and they motivate further work on lexical complexity and parafoveal preview benefits to explain the remaining gap. In short, we quantify when extra dyslexic costs arise, how large they are, and offer actionable guidance for interventions and computational models for dyslexics.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
A large-scale study of the effects of word frequency and predictability in naturalistic reading
A number of psycholinguistic studies have factorially manipulated words{'} contextual predictabilities and corpus frequencies and shown separable effects of each on measures of human sentence processing, a pattern which …
RetrievalSentenceDiscourse Context Predictability Effects in Hindi Word Order
We test the hypothesis that discourse predictability influences Hindi syntactic choice. While prior work has shown that a number of factors (e.g., information status, dependency length, and syntactic surprisal) influence…
SentenceModeling semantic association in self-paced reading with language model embeddings
Semantic association between a word and its context has been identified as an important component of reading comprehension, even when word predictability is accounted for. Recent research has highlighted the potential of…
Reading ComprehensionLanguage Models Explain Word Reading Times Better Than Empirical Predictability
Though there is a strong consensus that word length and frequency are the most important single-word features determining visual-orthographic access to the mental lexicon, there is less agreement as how to best capture s…
Additive modelsRetrievalSemantic SimilaritySemantic Textual Similarity+2Prosody leaks into the memories of words
The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter …