Emotional context and predictability in naturalistic reading aloud

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Reading Science

Background:

• Established research links word frequency and lexical valence to visual word processing of individual words.
• Previous studies on sentences show discourse context can modify single-word effects.
• Gaps exist in understanding these effects in naturalistic, multisentence contexts.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the influence of word frequency and lexical valence on oral reading performance in multisentence stimuli.
• To examine the interaction between word frequency and lexical valence during naturalistic reading.
• To assess reading speed as a measure of visual word processing dynamics in ecologically valid contexts.

Main Methods:

• Participants orally read multisentence text passages presented on-screen.
• Lexical features (word frequency, valence) were averaged over short text segments.
• Reading speed (words per second) was recorded as the primary performance metric.

Main Results:

• Consistent with prior research, higher word frequency positively correlated with increased reading speed.
• A positivity bias was observed, with more positive content leading to faster reading speeds.
• A significant interaction showed that high-frequency, negative content slowed reading performance.

Conclusions:

• Word frequency and emotional valence effects extend to naturalistic, multisentence oral reading.
• Findings support associative connectivity and oculomotor dynamics as explanations for observed reading patterns.
• Measuring reading speed in multisentence texts offers a valid, ecologically sound approach to studying visual word processing.