Effects of Lexical Properties on Viewing Time per Word in Autistic and Neurotypical Readers

Abstract

Eye tracking studies from the past few decades have shaped the way we think of word complexity and cognitive load: words that are long, rare and ambiguous are more difficult to read. However, online processing techniques have been scarcely applied to investigating the reading difficulties of people with autism and what vocabulary is challenging for them. We present parallel gaze data obtained from adult readers with autism and a control group of neurotypical readers and show that the former required higher cognitive effort to comprehend the texts as evidenced by three gaze-based measures. We divide all words into four classes based on their viewing times for both groups and investigate the relationship between longer viewing times and word length, word frequency, and four cognitively-based measures (word concreteness, familiarity, age of acquisition and imagability).

Web users with autism: eye tracking evidence for differences

“…There are a number of eye tracking studies involving participants with autism; however, these have mainly been focussed on investigating visual social attention and the processing of socially salient stimuli (Boraston and Blakemore 2007;Sterling et al 2008;Riby and Hancock 2009;Guillon et al 2014) and reading (Yaneva, Temnikova, and Mitkov 2015;Yaneva 2016;Yaneva, Temnikova, and Mitkov 2016;Štajner et al 2017). These studies have been extremely useful for understanding the differences in attention between people with autism and neurotypical people, highlighting the potential of gaze data to account for such subtle processes.…”

Autism and the web

“…These differences in attention are known to affect the way some people with autism process images in text documents, whereby they would focus on the image significantly longer than control-group participants (Yaneva, Temnikova and Mitkov, 2015). Another study reports that the lexical properties of words have an effect on different durations of the viewing time per word in autistic and neurotypical readers (Stajner et al, 2017).…”