Eye position and word identification during reading

College students read text displayed by computer as their eyes were being monitored. On occasional fixations or saccades the text was removed and the subject reported the last word that had been read and tried to guess the next word. Distributions of the location of the last read word with respect to the last fixated word give an indication of what words are being read during a fixation. The data do not support an anticipation model of reading nor the acquisition of peripheral cues concerning upcoming words

Some temporal characteristics of processing during reading

College students read passages displayed on a cathode-ray tube as their eye movements were being monitored. During occasional fixations all letters to the left of the directly fixated letter or all letters more than four to the right of the fixated letter were replaced by other letters. This replacement occurred either for only the first 100 ms of the fixation or only after the first 100 ms of the fixation. The eye movement data indicated that the eyes can respond to change in the visual stimulus within less than 100 ms, and to orthographic irregularity in the text within less than 160 ms. No evidence was found for a left-to-right attentional scan during a fixation. The results were interpreted within the framework of a chronology of processing events occurring during a fixation in reading

Eye movement control during reading : I. the location of initial eye fixations on words

Includes bibliographic references (p. 11-12

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