Chapter 15 - Eye movements in reading words and sentences

Abstract

The two most robust findings in studies of eye movements and reading are that (1) fixation time on a word is shorter if the reader has a valid preview of the word prior to fixating it, and (2) fixation time is shorter when the word is easy to identify and understand. Word recognition processes seem to be reflected quite straightforwardly in the eye movement record. In contrast, eye movements seem to reflect sentence comprehension processes in a more varied fashion. This chapter reviews the major word identification factors that affect eye movements and describe the role these eye movement phenomena have played in developing theories of eye movements in reading. The chapter tabulates and summarizes 100 reports of how syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and world-knowledge factors affect eye movements during reading in an initial attempt to identify order in how different types of challenges to comprehension are reflected in eye movements. The chapter reviews findings that have demonstrated effects due to (1) word frequency, (2) word familiarity, (3) age-of-acquisition, (4) number of meanings, (5) morphology, (6) contextual constraint, and (7) plausibility.