Undersweep fixations during reading in adults and children

Abstract

Return-sweeps take a reader's fixation from the end of one line to the start of the next.Return-sweeps frequently undershoot their target and are followed by a corrective saccade towards the left margin. The pauses prior to correctives saccades are typically considered to be uninvolved in linguistic processing. However, recent findings indicate that these undersweep-fixations influence skilled adult reader's subsequent reading pass across the line and provide preview of line-initial words. This research examined these effects in children.First, a children's reading corpus analysis revealed that words receiving an undersweepfixation were more likely skipped and received shorter gaze durations during a subsequent pass. Second, a novel eye movement experiment which directly compared adults' and children's eye movements indicated that, during an undersweep-fixation, readers very briefly allocate their attention to the fixated word-as indicated by inhibition of return effects during a subsequent pass-prior to deploying attention towards the line-initial word. We argue that, prior to the redeployment of attention, readers extract information at the point of fixation that facilitates later encoding and saccade targeting. Given similar patterns of results for adults and children, we conclude that the mechanisms controlling for oculomotor coordination and attention necessary for reading across line boundaries are established from a very early point in reading development.

Spelling ability influences early letter encoding during reading: Evidence from return-sweep eye movements

“…It is important to note that this prediction assumes that there is a leftward skew of attention when readers make return-sweeps (i.e., leftward saccades). This assumption is consistent with the notion that the movement of attention is consistent with the direction of the saccade that it precedes (Godijn & Pratt, 2002; Godijn & Theeuwes, 2003), and the observation that readers acquire information from the line-initial word when their line-initial fixation lands to its right (e.g., Parker et al, 2020). Of course, this is an open question as Veldre and Andrews (2014) reported that spelling ability did not influence the extraction of information to the left of rightwards moving intra-line fixations.…”

“…Furthermore, there appears to be no such benefit for words to the right of an undersweep fixation, suggesting that the skew of attention is directed towards the start of the line following a return-sweep (c.f. Parker et al, 2020). One question that remains unanswered is the extent to which the distribution of attention changes during return-sweeps.…”

“…That is not to say readers do not acquire information during these fixations. Slattery and Parker (2019), Parker and Slattery (2019), and Parker et al (2020) reported that readers can extract information at the point of, and to the left of, undersweep fixations. However, these fixations appear to be terminated based on retinal feedback following the return-sweep which, if exceeding a certain threshold, triggers a corrective saccade.…”

“…Finally, undersweep fixations typically result from oculomotor error with longer lines yielding more corrective saccades (Heller, 1982; Hofmeister et al, 1999; Parker, Nikolova, et al, 2019). While their duration is uninfluenced by lexical properties of the fixated word (Slattery & Parker, 2019), there is now converging evidence to suggest that readers are able to extract information at the point of the undersweep fixation (Parker et al, 2020; Slattery & Parker, 2019) and to the left of undersweep fixations (i.e., the line-initial word; Parker et al, 2020; Parker & Slattery, 2019). Given the hypothesised differential involvement of lexical processing for each population of fixation, there may be differences in the extent to which lexical quality influences the duration of each fixation population.…”

Return-sweep saccades in oral reading

“…Accurate line-initial fixations are longer than intra-line fixations, likely because they land on text that has not been processed parafoveally (Heller, 1982 ; Parker et al, 2017 ). However, undersweep fixations are shorter than other reading fixations, as they are terminated quickly in order to move the eye to a better viewing location (Abrams & Zuber, 1972 ; Hofmeister et al, 1999 ; Parker et al, 2019a , b , 2020 ).…”