Abstract
Models of eye-movement control during reading focus on reading single lines of text. However, with multiline texts, return sweeps, which bring fixation from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, occur regularly and influence ~20% of all reading fixations. Our understanding of return sweeps is still limited. One common feature of return sweeps is the prevalence of oculomotor errors. Return sweeps, often initially undershoot the start of the line. Corrective saccades then bring fixation closer to the line start. The fixation occurring between the undershoot and the corrective saccade (undersweep-fixation) has important theoretical implications for the serial nature of lexical processing during reading, as they occur on words ahead of the intended attentional target. Furthermore, since the attentional target of a return sweep will lie far outside the parafovea during the prior fixation, it cannot be lexically preprocessed during this prior fixation. We explore the implications of undersweep-fixations for ongoing processing and models of eye movements during reading by analysing two existing eye-movement data sets of multiline reading.
Highlights
As we read our eyes move from one location on the page to another in fast jumps, called saccades
Fixations less than 80 ms which were within one character of a temporally adjacent fixation were merged with that fixation
This led to the removal of 9.84% of return sweeps from the comprehension items and 4.20% from the Provo Corpus
Summary
As we read our eyes move from one location on the page to another in fast jumps, called saccades. Return sweeps are saccades made at the end of a line of text in order to fixate the subsequent line, and often undershoot line initial words (Hofmeister, Heller, & Radach, 1999; Parker, Kirkby, & Slattery, 2017). The short pauses between the return sweep and the corrective saccade are termed undersweep-fixations (Parker et al, 2017) They are an interesting test case for serial attention shift models of eye-movement control during reading as they occur on words ahead of the serial order and attentional targeting. Multiline reading studies typically exclude the fixations around return sweeps from analysis (see Table 1) As such, it remains unclear if and how the glimpse of a word afforded to readers during undersweep-fixations influences subsequent reading.
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