Eye movements in Arabic reading

Abstract

Measures of eye movements provide a moment-by-moment account of the visual and cognitive processes that underlie normal reading. These measures have been used to develop detailed sophisticated computational models of eye movement control during reading, primarily based on research conducted with European languages such as English and German, which use the Roman orthography. However, relatively little is known about the mechanisms underlying eye movement control during reading for Semitic languages, such as Arabic, which have very different visual and linguistic characteristics. In this chapter, we provide an overview of eye movement research on reading, including research conducted to date on eye movements in Arabic reading. We consider whether current computational models can account for these findings and outline key theoretical questions that remain to be examined empirically.