The present study investigated the relationship between the location and skew of an individual reader's fixation duration distribution. The ex-Gaussian distribution was fit to eye fixation data from 153 subjects in five experiments, four previously presented and one new. The τ parameter was entirely uncorrelated with the μ and σ parameters; by contrast, there was a modest positive correlation between these parameters for lexical decision and speeded pronunciation response times. The conclusion that, for fixation durations, the degree of skew is uncorrelated with the location of the distribution's central tendency was also confirmed nonparametrically, by examining vincentile plots for subgroups of subjects. Finally, the stability of distributional parameters for a given subject was demonstrated to be relatively high. Taken together with previous findings of selective influence on the μ parameter of the fixation duration distribution, the present results suggest that in reading, the location and the skew of the fixation duration distribution may reflect functionally distinct processes. The authors speculate that the skew parameter may specifically reflect the frequency of processing disruption.

Three experiments examined the effect of contextual givenness on eye movements in reading, following Schwarzschild’s (1999) analysis of givenness and focus-marking in which relations among entities as well as the entities themselves can be given. In each study, a context question was followed by an answer in which a critical word was either given, new, or contrastively (correctively) focused. Target words were read faster when the critical word provided given information than when it provided new information, and faster when it provided new information than when it corrected prior information. Repetition of target words was controlled in two ways: by mentioning a non-given target word in the context in a relation other than that in which it occurred as a target, and by using a synonym or subordinate of a given target to refer to it in the context question. Verbatim repetition was not responsible for the observed effects of givenness and contrastiveness. Besides clarifying previous inconsistent results of the effects of focus and givenness on reading speed, these results indicate that reading speed can be influenced essentially immediately by a reader’s discourse representation, and that the extent of the influence is graded, with corrections to a representation having a larger effect than simple additions

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