Eye movements in reading: Some theoretical context

Abstract

The study of eye movements has proven to be one of the most successful approaches in research on reading. In this overview, it is argued that a major reason for this success is that eye movement measurement is not just a methodology—the control of eye movements is actually part and parcel of the dynamics of information processing within the task of reading itself. Some major developments over the last decade are discussed with a focus on the issue of spatially distributed word processing and its relation to the development of reading models. The survey ends with a description of two newly emerging trends in the field: the study of continuous reading in non-Roman writing systems and the broadening of the scope of research to encompass individual differences and developmental issues.

Keywords:

• Eye movements
• Models of reading
• Parafoveal processing
• Serial processing
• Parallel processing

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge many helpful corrections and suggestions for improvement from Martin Fischer, Keith Rayner, Francoise Vitu, and Ronan Reilly. We are also grateful to Sabine Hackenberg for help in completing this manuscript. Preparation of this article was supported by a grant from the German Science Foundation (GZ: GU 1177/1-1) and by the IES-funded Florida State University Research and Development Center for Pre-K to 5th Grade Student Comprehension (RF 305F1000027).

Notes

¹ In recent years, there has been steady progress in the development of methods and software for eye movement data analysis. For example, Lans, van der Wedel, and Pieters (2012) suggested an interesting algorithm to identify fixations from eye movement records of both eyes using individual eye velocity thresholds. Tang, Reilly, and Vorstius (2012) developed flexible data analysis and data visualization software for reading and made their work available to the research community. Baptista, Bohn, Kliegl, Engbert, and Kurths (2008) developed an algorithm capable of reconstructing eye position during blinks, addressing a major source of data loss, especially with problematic populations such as children or older adults. The question of whether and how blinks are related to or coordinated with the acquisition and processing of visual information in reading is as yet unresolved.

² It should be noted that both dimensions—autonomous saccade generation versus cognitive control and sequential versus parallel word processing—are really necessary for a meaningful model classification (Jacobs, 2000; Radach et al., 2007). This can be illustrated (i.e., without further specific commitment to the plausibility of any particular model) using the example of Mr. Chips, an ideal observer model of reading developed by Legge, Klitz, and Tjan (1997; see also Legge, Hooven, Klitz, Mansfield, & Tjan, 2002) where both letter and word processing are parallel across word boundaries but saccade control is exclusively determined by cognitive processing. One the other hand, there are models such as SERIF (McDonald, Carpenter, & Schillcock, 2005), and the competition–interaction model (Yang, 2006; Yang & McConkie, 2001), where there is only modest, and indirect, cognitive influence on saccade control.

³ The current stream of studies on Chinese reading rests on pioneering work from two leading researchers in the field, George McConkie and Albrecht Inhoff, who, together with young Chinese researchers, started more than two decades ago to examine problems of oculomotor control and word processing while reading Chinese. Since 2004, Keith Rayner, Deli Shen, Guoli Yan, and other Chinese colleagues have organized the biannual China International Conference on Eye Movements (CICEM), which has developed into a very effective engine of productive international collaboration.

⁴ As Korean shares this structural feature with many other left-branching languages like Turkish, Japanese, Tamil, and Basque, one may speculate whether there might be more writing systems in which the simultaneous foveal and parafoveal processing of semantic and/or syntactic information is the rule and not the exception in routine reading behaviour.

⁵ The importance of this line of research can hardly be overstated. Anyone who has been at a meeting like the annual conference of the Society for the Study of Reading (SSSR) knows that the community of reading researchers working with psychometric assessments of reading skills is far larger than the community engaged in cognitive-science-based reading research. Unifying these two “styles of science in the study of reading” (Stanovich, 2003) would greatly extend the impact of eye movement work within the education science community and pave the way for more applied work.