Using Eye Movements to Investigate the Impact of Childhood and Recent Frequency of Occurrence on Word Identification During Reading in College

ABSTRACT

During reading, high-frequency words consistently receive shorter fixation durations relative to low-frequency words. However, how frequently a given word is experienced can vary across an individual’s education. In the current study, the effects of both childhood and college-level word frequency on fixation durations were examined to assess the relative role of early childhood and recent frequency of occurrence on word identification during reading. Eye movements were recorded as 40 college students read neutral sentences containing 96 target words. The words varied on childhood and college-level frequency. Length of the sentences and pre-target and post-target characteristics were controlled across the four frequency conditions. Data were analyzed via linear mixed models fit to log-transformed fixation duration measures. Three fixation duration measures were examined to explore the time course of processing. Clear effects of college-level frequency were observed on fixation durations on the target words. The frequency with which a word is recently experienced during college affects word identification time in context. This suggests that the effect of word frequency on fixation durations during sentence reading is experience dependent and further supports the need for eye movement experiments to employ age-appropriate recent frequency estimates.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the undergraduate research assistants from the Wesleyan University Eye Movement and Reading Lab who contributed to this project including Makaela Kaye, Akila Raoul, and Wiralpach Nawabutsitthirat. Portions of the data were presented at the Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting in November 2018.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Notes

1. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Wesleyan University project grant.