Tracking the mind during reading: the influence of past, present, and future words on fixation durations.
Reading requires the orchestration of visual, attentional, language-related, and oculomotor processing constraints. This study replicates previous effects of frequency, predictability, and length of fixated words on fixation durations in natural reading and demonstrates new effects of these variables related to 144 sentences. Such evidence for distributed processing of words across fixation durations challenges psycholinguistic immediacy-of-processing and eye-mind assumptions. Most of the time the mind processes several words in parallel at different perceptual and cognitive levels. Eye movements can help to unravel these processes.
Kliegl
Reinhold
R
University of Potsdam, PO Box 60 15 53, 14451 Potsdam, Germany. kliegl@rz.uni-potsdam.de
Nuthmann
Antje
A
Engbert
Ralf
R
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D032882:Comprehension; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009949:Orientation; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012660:Semantics; D014794:Visual Fields