Word skipping: Implications for theories of eye movement control in reading

Abstract

Eye movements in reading are characterized by short periods of steadiness (fixations) followed by fast movements (saccades). Saccades are needed to bring new inform-ation into the centre of the visual field where acuity is best; fixations are required to recognize words. Assuming that the central (foveal) word is identified during a fixation, it is tempting to forward the hypothesis that eye movements in reading essentially consist of word-to-word movements. Unfortunately, such a simple sequence of motion is rarely observed in empirical data. Some words are fixated more than once, some are initially not fixated but immediately afterwards regressed to, and some are not fixated at all. Ever since the first measurements of eye movements in reading, researchers have been puzzled by this complicated pattern of activity and have suggested various explanations for it. In this chapter, we will focus on one aspect, namely the fact that more than one third of the words are initially skipped during reading. First, we will discuss the explanations offered by different authors, then we will examine the empirical evidence more closely, and, finally, we will present an alternative account of word skipping.

The influence of a word’s number of letters, spatial extent, and initial bigram characteristics on eye movement control during reading: Evidence from Arabic.

“…With regard to saccade targeting measures, our results show clearly that spatial extent, not number of letters, influenced the probability of word skipping thus replicating the findings reported by Hautala et al (2011) who also controlled spatial extent and number of letters. Our results also replicate the findings from investigations using monospaced fonts in which the relationship between number of letters and spatial extent was linear, and longer words (of wider extent and containing more letters) were skipped less than shorter words (e.g., Brysbaert et al, 2005;Drieghe et al, 2004).…”

Data from eye-tracking corpora as evidence for theories of syntactic processing complexity

“…This is higher than previously reported numbers, e.g., Brysbaert and Vitu (1998) found a skipping rate of only just over one third in first pass reading. Therefore, many words have a reading time value 0.…”

How strongly do word reading times and lexical decision times correlate? Combining data from eye movement corpora and megastudies

“…On the basis of our experiences with eye movement research, we think that the best eye movement measure for examining word processing may be contingent on word length. For words of 3 letters and less, skipping rate is the preferred measure, as these words are more often skipped than fixated (Brysbaert, Drieghe & Vitu, 2005). For words between 4 and 8 letters single fixation duration is indicated, as these words are shorter than average saccade length (about 8 letters) and, therefore, are likely to be processed in a single fixation.…”