Universality in eye movements and reading: A trilingual investigation

Abstract

Universality in language has been a core issue in the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics for many years (e.g., Chomsky, 1965). Recently, Frost (2012) has argued that establishing universals of process is critical to the development of meaningful, theoretically motivated, cross-linguistic models of reading. In contrast, other researchers argue that there is no such thing as universals of reading (e.g., Coltheart & Crain, 2012). Reading is a complex, visually mediated psychological process, and eye movements are the behavioral means by which we encode the visual information required for linguistic processing. To investigate universality of representation and process across languages we examined eye movement behavior during reading of very comparable stimuli in three languages, Chinese, English and Finnish. These languages differ in numerous respects (character based vs. alphabetic, visual density, informational density, word spacing, orthographic depth, agglutination, etc.). We used Linear mixed modelling techniques to identify variables that captured common variance across languages. Despite fundamental visual and linguistic differences in the orthographies, statistical models of reading behavior were strikingly similar in a number of respects, and thus, we argue that their composition might reflect universality of representation and process in reading.! 3!

Searching for a word in Chinese text: insights from eye movement behaviour

“…Together such findings would indicate that for both alphabetic and logographic languages, eye movement control for non-target words during target word search is driven at least largely by only superficial orthographic processing of the text. That is, there may be similarity in the mechanisms underlying the process of target word search across languages (see Liversedge et al, 2016). Such a pattern would be in line with the predictions of Reichle, Pollatsek, and Rayner's (2012) model of target word search.…”

Character-complexity effects in Chinese reading and visual search: A comparison and theoretical implications

“…The hypothesis also suggests that differences in writing systems can fundamentally influence how the perceptual and cognitive “machinery” that supports reading may have to be configured to support lexical processing. And perhaps just as interestingly, the hypothesis suggests that—at least within certain limits—the perceptual and cognitive processes that are engaged during reading can be readily adapted to support highly skilled comprehension of text despite of the profound differences between languages and writing systems (Liversedge et al, 2016). …”

New Perspectives on Serialism and Parallelism in Oculomotor Control During Reading: The Multi-Constituent Unit Hypothesis

“…Even in a spaced language like Finnish, a highly agglutinative language, a word might be comprised of multiple constituent sub-words that appear together without spacing. For example, "lumi" is the basic form of "snow", "lumipallo" means "snowball", "lumipallosota" means "snowball fight", and "lumipallosotatantere" means "snow ball fight field" [9,38]. It is likely that Finnish readers segment and encode the orthography of such words in chunks or units smaller than the entire word, though it remains unclear as to exactly how they determine the units of orthography to encode during a fixation [38][39][40].…”

“…It is widely accepted that eye movements are under cognitive control during reading [5][6][7][8], and are both central to the process of reading, and constrain the rate at which orthographic information is encoded and processed by the written comprehension system [9]. Currently, there are several cognitive computational models of eye movement control that provide a good account of oculomotor behavior during reading of English and other alphabetic languages.…”