Reading strategy modulates parafoveal-on-foveal effects in sentence reading

Task demands and individual differences have been linked reliably to word skipping during reading. Such differences in fixation probability may imply a selection effect for multivariate analyses of eye-movement corpora if selection effects correlate with word properties of skipped words. For example, with fewer fixations on short and highly frequent words the power to detect parafoveal-on-foveal effects is reduced. We demonstrate that increasing the fixation probability on function words with a manipulation of the expected difficulty and frequency of questions reduces an age difference in skipping probability (i.e., old adults become comparable to young adults) and helps to uncover significant parafoveal-on-foveal effects in this group of old adults. We discuss implications for the comparison of results of eye-movement research based on multivariate analysis of corpus data with those from display-contingent manipulations of target words

Improving Eye Movement Control in Young Readers

The objective of our study is to design and evaluate an oculomotor reading aid for beginning readers. The aid consists of an eye-tracking device and a computer program that gives real-time feedback in the form of a game to the subject about their fixation position on words. An experimental study was conducted with 8-year-old children. We evaluated the effectiveness of the aid for each child by comparing the landing site distributions before and after playing the game. We found that the peak of the landing site distribution moved towards the optimal viewing position (OVP) for word identification after playing the game. We also determined that training had a positive effect on gaze duration, on the mean and distribution of number of fixations per word, and on the percentage of words with refixations in the majority of subjects