Analysis of Eye Movements and Linguistic Boundaries in a Text for the Investigation of Japanese Reading Processes

Abstract

In order to investigate reading processes of Japanese language learners, we have conducted an experiment to record eye movements during Japanese text reading using an eye-tracking system. We showed that Japanese native speakers use “forward and backward jumping eye movements” frequently [13],[14]. In this paper, we analyzed further the same eye tracking data. Our goal is to examine whether Japanese learners fix their eye movements at boundaries of linguistic units such as words, phrases or clauses when they start or end “backward jumping”. We consider conventional linguistic boundaries as well as boundaries empirically defined based on the entropy of the N-gram model. Another goal is to examine the relation between the entropy of the N-gram model and the depth of syntactic structures of sentences. Our analysis shows that (1) Japanese learners often fix their eyes at linguistic boundaries, (2) the average of the entropy is the greatest at the fifth depth of syntactic structures.