Eye movements during reading and topic scanning: Effects of word frequency.

Abstract

The study examines the nature of eye movement control and word recognition during scanning for a specific topic, compared to reading for comprehension. Experimental trials included a manipulation of word frequency: the critical word was frequent (and orthographically familiar) or infrequent (two conditions: orthographically familiar, orthographically unfamiliar). First-pass reading times showed effects of word frequency for both reading and scanning, with no interactions between word characteristics and task. Therefore, in contrast to the task of searching for a single specific word (Rayner & Fischer, 1996), there are immediate and localised influences of lexical processing when scanning for a specific topic, indicating that early word recognition processes are similar during reading and topic scanning. In contrast, there were interactions for later measures, with larger effects of word frequency during reading than scanning, indicating that reading goals can modulate later processes such as the integration of words into sentence context. Additional analyses of the distribution of first-pass single fixation durations indicate that first-pass fixations of all durations were shortened during scanning compared to reading, and reading for comprehension produced a larger subset of longer first-pass fixations compared to scanning. Implications for the nature of word recognition and eye movement control are discussed.

A further look at ageing and word predictability effects in Chinese reading: Evidence from one-character words

“…strategy (see, for example, White et al, 2015), as reading times and the number and length of fixations were comparable to previous research with lower skipping rates (e.g., Zhao et al, 2019). Crucially, despite the high skipping rate, there was no indication of an age difference in predictability effects in word-skipping.…”

Effects of Normative Aging on Eye Movements during Reading

“…These studies are valuable in highlighting the potential that older readers may adopt different strategies depending on task demands. It will, therefore, be important to establish what factors cause older readers to employ a particular reading strategy (and for discussion of effects of reading strategy and goals on eye movements see [44,[103][104][105][106][107]). It will also be important to establish whether risky reading is used to compensate for slower processing in older age as Rayner et al (2006) [97] proposed.…”

Eye Tracking Technology in Detecting the Switch Cost in the Intra-sentential Code-Switching Contexts

“…Words that are encountered more frequently are processed faster than their less frequent counterparts [17]. Words with higher frequency are typically processed more quickly and accurately than words with lower frequency [18]. Readers with higher comprehension scores (who perhaps were reading more carefully) showed larger word frequency effects than readers with lower comprehension scores [19].…”