Scanpaths in reading are informative about sentence processing

Scanpaths, sequences of fixations of the eyes, have historically played an important role in eyetracking research but their use has remained highly limited until recently. Here, we summarize earlier research and argue that scanpaths are a valuable source of information for reading research, specifically in the study of sentence comprehension. We also discuss a freely available, open source scanpath analysis method that we used to evaluate theoretical claims about human parsing and about how the parser guides the eyes during reading. This scanpath analysis is shown to yield new information that was missed when traditional approaches were used to study theories about eye guidance during garden-pathing. We also show how relatively subtle scanpath effects can be detected when we report the scanpath analysis of a large eyetracking corpus. In sum, we argue that scanpath analyses are likely to serve as an increasingly important tool in reading research, and perhaps also in other areas where eyetracking is used, e.g., in studies using the visual world paradigm.

[1]  C. Clifton,et al.  Overt reanalysis strategies and eye movements during the reading of mild garden path sentences , 2002, Memory & cognition.

[2]  Rachel S. Sussman,et al.  Structural and semantic constraints on the resolution of pronouns and reflexives , 2009, Cognition.

[3]  R Core Team,et al.  R: A language and environment for statistical computing. , 2014 .

[4]  Ronald M. Kaplan,et al.  Augmented Transition Networks as Psychological Models of Sentence Comprehension , 1971, IJCAI.

[5]  Ralf Engbert,et al.  Length, frequency, and predictability effects of words on eye movements in reading , 2004 .

[6]  Marcus Nyström,et al.  A vector-based, multidimensional scanpath similarity measure , 2010, ETRA.

[7]  L. Stark,et al.  Spontaneous Eye Movements During Visual Imagery Reflect the Content of the Visual Scene , 1997, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[8]  Lyn Frazier,et al.  ON COMPREHENDING SENTENCES: SYNTACTIC PARSING STRATEGIES. , 1979 .

[9]  Erik D. Reichle,et al.  The effect of word frequency, word predictability, and font difficulty on the eye movements of young and older readers. , 2006, Psychology and aging.

[10]  Shravan Vasishth,et al.  What is the scanpath signature of syntactic reanalysis , 2011 .

[11]  Françoise Vitu,et al.  Word skipping: Implications for theories of eye movement control in reading , 1998 .

[12]  Adrian E. Raftery,et al.  Model-Based Clustering, Discriminant Analysis, and Density Estimation , 2002 .

[13]  G. McConkie,et al.  Regressive Saccades and Word Perception in Adult Reading , 2000 .

[14]  M A Just,et al.  A theory of reading: from eye fixations to comprehension. , 1980, Psychological review.

[15]  Reinhold Kliegl,et al.  Parsing costs as predictors of reading difficulty: An evaluation using the Potsdam Sentence Corpus , 2008, Journal of Eye Movement Research.

[16]  K. Rayner,et al.  Eye movements in reading words and sentences , 2007 .

[17]  G. Schwarz.  Estimating the Dimension of a Model , 1978 .

[18]  K. Rayner.  The perceptual span and peripheral cues in reading , 1975, Cognitive Psychology.

[19]  John R. Anderson,et al.  Automated Eye-Movement Protocol Analysis , 2001, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[20]  Richard L. Lewis,et al.  An Activation-Based Model of Sentence Processing as Skilled Memory Retrieval , 2005, Cogn. Sci..

[21]  Adrian E. Raftery,et al.  MCLUST Version 3 for R: Normal Mixture Modeling and Model-Based Clustering † , 2007 .

[22]  Jan Theeuwes,et al.  ScanMatch: A novel method for comparing fixation sequences , 2010, Behavior research methods.

[23]  J. Kruskal.  Multidimensional scaling by optimizing goodness of fit to a nonmetric hypothesis , 1964 .

[24]  K. Rayner,et al.  Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences , 1982, Cognitive Psychology.

[25]  Moreno I. Coco,et al.  Scan Patterns Predict Sentence Production in the Cross-Modal Processing of Visual Scenes , 2012, Cogn. Sci..

[26]  Michael E. Holmes,et al.  Attention to repeated images on the World-Wide Web: Another look at scanpath theory , 2002, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[27]  Jan Theeuwes,et al.  A simple way to estimate similarity between pairs of eye movement sequences , 2012 .

[28]  D. Whitteridge,et al.  The representation of the visual field on the cerebral cortex in monkeys , 1961, The Journal of physiology.

[29]  A. Meyer,et al.  Using the visual world paradigm to study language processing: a review and critical evaluation. , 2011, Acta psychologica.

[30]  Alexander Pollatsek,et al.  Eye movements and word skipping during reading revisited. , 2005, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[31]  Roger Levy,et al.  A Rational Model of Eye Movement Control in Reading , 2010, ACL.

[32]  A. L. I︠A︡rbus.  Eye Movements and Vision , 1967 .

[33]  Vladimir I. Levenshtein,et al.  Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals , 1965 .

[34]  Reinhold Kliegl,et al.  SWIFT: a dynamical model of saccade generation during reading. , 2005, Psychological review.

[35]  John Hale,et al.  A Probabilistic Earley Parser as a Psycholinguistic Model , 2001, NAACL.

[36]  J. Rovamo,et al.  Cortical magnification factor predicts the photopic contrast sensitivity of peripheral vision , 1978, Nature.

[37]  Roger Levy,et al.  Why readers regress to previous words: A statistical analysis , 2011, CogSci.

[38]  K. Rayner.  Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. , 1998, Psychological bulletin.

[39]  S. B. Needleman,et al.  A general method applicable to the search for similarities in the amino acid sequence of two proteins. , 1970, Journal of molecular biology.

[40]  A. L. Yarbus,et al.  Eye Movements and Vision , 1967, Springer US.

[41]  Don C. Mitchell,et al.  Accounting for regressive eye-movements in models of sentence processing: A reappraisal of the Selective Reanalysis hypothesis , 2008 .

[42]  John Hale,et al.  Parallel processing and sentence comprehension difficulty , 2011 .