A Cross-Linguistic Study of Spatial Parameters of Eye-Movement Control During Reading

Current theories of oculomotor control in reading differ in their accounts of saccadic targeting. Some argue that targets for saccades are solely selected on the basis of the rapidly changing sensory input, whereas others additionally allow for the reader's experiential biases to modulate saccade lengths. We investigated this debate using cross-linguistic data on text reading in 12 alphabetic languages from the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO) database. These languages vary widely in their word length distributions, suggesting that expected word lengths and corresponding biases toward optimal saccade lengths may also vary across readers of these languages. Regression analyses confirmed that readers of languages with longer words (e.g., Finnish) rather than shorter words (e.g., Hebrew) landed further into the word, even when sensory aspects relevant for saccade planning (e.g., word lengths) were controlled for. In the prevalent saccade type, a one-letter difference in mean word length between languages came with one-quarter-letter of a difference in initial landing position and saccade length, and a decrease in 1.5% in refixation probability. Interpreted in the Bayesian framework, the findings highlight the relevance of global language-wide settings for accounts of spatial oculomotor control and lead to testable predictions for further cross-linguistic research. Public Significance Statement Where the eye gaze lands on a word during reading strongly determines the reading effort. Current theories of eye-movement control agree that visual characteristics of the words under the eye-gaze affect landing positions. Yet they argue whether the reader's experience with language structure plays an independent additional role. This article considers new data from 12 alphabetic languages, which vary in their word lengths. The findings show that landing positions vary across languages, in correlation to the average word lengths in those languages. These results provide support to the view that statistical knowledge about patterns of language influence real-time oculomotor control over and above the effects of the visual input under the eye-gaze.