Tracking the Mind During Reading The Influence of Past, Present, and Future Words on Fixation Durations

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. General Vol. 135; no. 1; pp. 12 - 35
• Main Authors: Kliegl, Reinhold, Nuthmann, Antje, Engbert, Ralf
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC American Psychological Association 01-02-2006
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Biological and medical sciences; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive Processes; Comprehension; Eye Fixation; Eye Movements; Female; Fixation, Ocular; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Humans; Language; Language Processing; Male; Middle Aged; Orientation; Production and perception of written language; Psycholinguistics; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reaction Time; Reading; Reading Processes; Regression Analysis; Semantics; Sentences; Visual Fields; Visual Search; Visual Tracking; Word Recognition; reading; eye movements; gaze; word recognition; fixation duration; Human; Word; Visual fixation; Gaze; Cognition; Duration; Verbal perception; Experimental study; Reading; Language; Vision; Perception; Recognition
• ISSN: 0096-3445; 1939-2222
• DOI: 10.1037/0096-3445.135.1.12

Reading requires the orchestration of visual, attentional, language-related, and oculomotor processing constraints. This study replicates previous effects of frequency, predictability, and length of fixated words on fixation durations in natural reading and demonstrates new effects of these variables related to previous and next words. Results are based on fixation durations recorded from 222 persons, each reading 144 sentences. Such evidence for distributed processing of words across fixation durations challenges psycholinguistic immediacy-of-processing and eye-mind assumptions. Most of the time the mind processes several words in parallel at different perceptual and cognitive levels. Eye movements can help to unravel these processes.