Information Influences the Pattern of Eye Fixations during Sentence Comprehension

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Abstract
How does the pattern of eye fixation vary as an informative part of a word is encountered? If the processing of information lags behind the movement of the eyes, then we should expect no variation in the pattern; but if processing is immediate, then the movements of the reader's eyes should correspond to the distribution of information being inspected. An experiment is reported which examined the ways that the text ahead of the point of current fixation can be used to guide the eyes to future fixations, by monitoring fixations during a sentence comprehension task. The patterns of eye fixations upon words with uneven distributions of information (where, for example, words predictable from the sight of their first few letters but not from their last few letters are defined as containing informative beginnings) were observed, and it was found that more and longer fixations were produced when subjects looked at the informative parts of words, particularly at the informative endings of words. The results support the suggestion that eye movements are under the moment-to-moment control of cognitive mechanisms.

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