Eye Movements During Reading

Abstract

The present chapter is a brief introduction to research on eye movements during reading. In the chapter, we will describe what the eye movement methodology has revealed about word recognition, syntactic parsing of sentences, and comprehension of longer segments of text. The typical eye movement pattern in reading is one where the reader makes a sequence of left to right eye movements from one word to the next so that most words are fixated at least once. Words that typically do not receive a fixation are short, high-frequency function words, such as articles and prepositions. Fixation time spent on individual words and larger text units can then be used to tap into the cognitive processes that make reading possible. A wealth of data has been accumulated on using fixation time measures to investigate word recognition processes during reading. These studies have shown that fixation times reliably reflect the underlying mental processes ongoing during fixations on words. It has been shown, among other things, that orthographic, phonological and semantic features all influence the time spent fixating a word. This also applies to developing readers, who differ from mature readers in making more and longer fixations, shorter saccades and more regressions. The differences in eye movement patterns between developing and mature readers are primarily explained by lexical processing efficiency, not by low-level oculomotor factors. Eye movements have also been used to study processing of non-foveal text information. This is referred to as parafoveal word processing. Here the interesting questions are how far to the periphery useful information can be extracted and what kind of information can be gleaned from words around the fixated word. It has been found that the readers’ perceptual span is strongly biased toward the reading direction, that is, to the right when reading from left to right. Developing readers have smaller perceptual span than proficient readers. Adult readers extract parafoveally visual, orthographic and phonological information from the word to the right of the fixated word. Recent evidence suggests that they are also capable of extracting parafoveally semantic information concerning word meanings. Developmental studies of parafoveal word processing are just beginning to accrue. In the study of sentence parsing, that is, assigning a syntactic structure to a sentence, eye-tracking has become the gold standard. Having reliable and sensitive measures of the timing of effects is pertinent in testing predictions derived from different competing theories of sentence parsing. That sentences (and clauses) are regarded as processing units is demonstrated by the sentence wrap-up effect. Readers pause for longer time at sentence-final words before proceeding to the next sentence, presumably in order to integrate the words into a coherent sentence meaning. Eye movement studies of sentence parsing have demonstrated that parsing takes place incrementally as readers proceed through the sentence. Syntactic ambiguity, syntactic complexity and syntactic violations, among other things, have been shown to influence the eye movement patterns during sentence comprehension. Reading texts longer than single sentences has been the least researched area in the study of eye movements during reading. However, with the help of eye fixation measures developed to study global text processing, eye movement studies on text comprehension have recently been gaining increased popularity. To date, eye fixation patterns have been used to study how readers construct and update a mental representation of the text contents. For example, studies have been conducted on how readers solve inconsistencies in text and comprehend ironic statements. Moreover, research has shown that the reading goal has pervasive effects on eye movements during reading. Among other things, readers make more and longer fixations when reading text segments relevant to their reading goal. Also developing readers are capable of using a reading goal to adjust their intake of text information as they proceed through the text.