Abstract
Currently there are several computational models of eye movement control that provide a good account of oculomotor behavior during reading of English and other alphabetic languages. I will provide an overview of two dominant models: E-Z Reader and SWIFT, as well as a recently proposed model: OB1-Reader. I will evaluate a critical issue of controversy among models, namely, whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel. I will then consider reading in Chinese, a character-based, unspaced language with ambiguous word boundaries. Finally, I will evaluate the concepts of serialism and parallelism of process central to these models, and how these models might function in relation to lexical processing that is operationalized over parafoveal multi-constituent units.
Highlights
Reading is a visually mediated psychological process
When word length information is not immediately obvious in reading unspaced languages such as Chinese, a language in which it has been shown that the length of a word influences word identification and saccadic targeting [35], it is an interesting challenge for OB1 to explain how readers segment the text into words in order to use word length information to keep track of word order and maintain a sentence-level representation
Do the E-Z Reader, SWIFT, and OB1 models offer conflicting accounts of the nature of lexical processing that occurs across fixations during reading, but they have no mechanism for word segmentation within them
Summary
Humans process visual information via the eyes, and during reading, text is visually encoded and an abstract orthographic representation is formed. Readers spend less time fixating a word when it is parafoveally available compared to when it is masked or removed [4] This advantage is referred to as the preview benefit [2] and indicates that partial information about parafoveal words is available prior to their direct fixation. The “where” decision (in relation to progressive saccades) refers to which word is selected as the upcoming saccadic target, and the specific position where the eyes land on a target word, captured by fixation probability and fixation location measures. There are several cognitive computational models of eye movement control that provide a good account of oculomotor behavior during reading of English and other alphabetic languages. A hypothesis concerning processing of multi-constituent units will be proposed as a potential solution to the current serialism/parallelism impasse
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