Abstract
Reading processes affect not only the mean of fixation duration but also its distribution function. This paper introduces a set of hypotheses that link the timing and strength of a reading process to the hazard function of a fixation duration distribution. Analyses based on large corpora of reading eye movements show a surprisingly robust hazard function across languages, age, individual differences, and a number of processing variables. The data suggest that eye movements are generated stochastically based on a stereotyped time course that is independent of reading variables. High-level reading processes, however, modulate eye movement programming by increasing or decreasing the momentary saccade rate during a narrow time window. Implications to theories and analyses of reading eye movement are discussed.
Highlights
The present paper was motivated by the lack of a general linking hypothesis that allows a direct estimation of the time course of reading processes from empirical fixation duration data
A set of new linking hypothesis is developed based on the assumption that a change in a reading process should affect the intensity of eye movements in real-time
This leads to a focus on the empirical hazard function of fixation duration distributions
Summary
The eye movement data used in this study came from 262 readers from three age groups and five countries. Data were collected in four different labs around the world using three different eye tracking systems. It is worth noting that there was no data censoring, i.e., no fixations were discarded because it is too short or too long. This is crucial for distributional analyses because the common practice of excluding long fixations – a form of right censoring (Le, 1997) – can dramatically inflate the hazard function.
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