Inferring Native and Non-Native Human Reading Comprehension and Subjective Text Difficulty from Scanpaths in Reading

Eye movements in reading are known to reflect cognitive processes involved in reading comprehension at all linguistic levels, from the sub-lexical to the discourse level. This means that reading comprehension and other properties of the text and/or the reader should be possible to infer from eye movements. Consequently, we develop the first neural sequence architecture for this type of tasks which models scan paths in reading and incorporates lexical, semantic and other linguistic features of the stimulus text. Our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in various tasks. These include inferring reading comprehension or text difficulty, and assessing whether the reader is a native speaker of the text’s language. We further conduct an ablation study to investigate the impact of each component of our proposed neural network on its performance