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Evidence for a global oculomotor program in reading

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Abstract

Recent corpus studies of eye-movements in reading revealed a substantial increase in saccade amplitudes and fixation durations as the eyes move over the first words of a sentence. This start-up effect suggests a global oculomotor program, which operates on the level of an entire line, in addition to the well-established local programs operating within the visual span. The present study investigates the nature of this global program experimentally and examines whether the start-up effect is predicated on generic visual or specific linguistic characteristics and whether it is mainly reflected in saccade amplitudes, fixation durations or both measures. Eye movements were recorded while 38 participants read (a) normal sentences, (b) sequences of randomly shuffled words and (c) sequences of z-strings. The stimuli were, therefore, similar in their visual features, but varied in the amount of syntactic and lexical information. Further, the stimuli were composed of words or strings that either varied naturally in length (Nonequal condition) or were all restricted to a specific length within a sentence (Equal). The latter condition constrained the variability of saccades and served to dissociate effects of word position in line on saccade amplitudes and fixation durations. A robust start-up effect emerged in saccade amplitudes in all Nonequal stimuli, and—in an attenuated form—in Equal sentences. A start-up effect in single fixation durations was observed in Nonequal and Equal normal sentences, but not in z-strings. These findings support the notion of a global oculomotor program in reading particularly for the spatial characteristics of motor planning, which rely on visual rather than linguistic information.

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Notes

  1. A fourth gaze-contingent condition was implemented too, but failed to yield results due to a programming error in defining the gaze contingent trigger in the Experiment Builder software. The removal of this condition does not affect the other non-gaze contingent conditions and is therefore is not reported further.

  2. While segmented regressions estimate breakpoints as discrete parameters by definition, we make no inferences about whether respective transitions between regression slopes are discrete or gradual in nature (for a gradual modeling of same patterns, see mixed effects models with cubic splines in the Supplementary Materials and Fig. 1). Accordingly, discrete breakpoints in our analyses do not necessarily imply qualitative differences between processes in different segments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Western Ontario, 1151 Richmond St, London, ON, N6A 3K7, Canada

    Noor Al-Zanoon

  2. University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Michael Dambacher

  3. McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

    Victor Kuperman

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  1. Noor Al-Zanoon
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  2. Michael Dambacher
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  3. Victor Kuperman
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Correspondence to Noor Al-Zanoon.

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Funding

This work was supported by the funding from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council or Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant 402395-2012, the Early Research Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, the National Institutes of Health NIH R01 HD 073288 (PI Julie A. Van Dyke), and the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) award to Victor Kuperman. This work was also completed by Noor Al-Zanoon as an undergraduate thesis in the Cognitive Science of Language program at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada).

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All authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee (McMaster Research Ethics Board, protocol 2011 165).

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Al-Zanoon, N., Dambacher, M. & Kuperman, V. Evidence for a global oculomotor program in reading. Psychological Research 81, 863–877 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-016-0786-x

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