The influence of a word’s number of letters, spatial extent, and initial bigram characteristics on eye movement control during reading: Evidence from Arabic.

Abstract

The authors conducted 2 eye movement experiments in which they used the typographical and linguistic properties of Arabic to disentangle the influences of words’ number of letters and spatial extent on measures of fixation duration and saccade targeting (Experiment 1), and to investigate the influence of initial bigram characteristics on saccade targeting during reading (Experiment 2). In the first experiment, through the use of a proportional font, which is more natural-looking in Arabic compared to monospaced fonts, the authors manipulated the number of letters (5 vs. 7) and the spatial extent (wide vs. narrow) of words embedded in frame sentences. The results obtained replicate and expand upon previous findings in other alphabetic languages that the number of letters influences fixation durations, whereas saccade targeting (as indicated by measures of fixation count and probability of skipping and refixation) is more influenced by the word’s spatial extent. In the second experiment, the authors compared saccade targeting measures (saccade amplitude and initial fixation location) in 6- and 7-letter words beginning with initial bigrams that were of extremely high frequency (ال the), relatively high frequency (لل to/for the), or beginning with the letters of the word stem. The results showed negligible modulation of saccade targeting by initial bigram characteristics. The results also highlighted the importance of selecting the appropriate measures of initial fixation location (spatial vs. character-based measures) during reading text rendered using proportional fonts.

Insights from the study of Arabic reading

“…By contrast, as is true with other languages (Rayner, 1998, 2009), the best predictors of when the eyes move are linguistic variables such as word frequency (Hermena et al, 2019), cloze predictability (Hermena, Bouamama, Liversedge, & Drieghe, in press) and the number of letters within a word (Hermena et al, 2017, Experiment 2; see also Paterson, Almabruk, McGowan, White, & Jordan, 2015). Interestingly, because most Arabic words are 6–9 letters long, they typically receive more, longer fixations (e.g., Hermena et al, 2015; Hermena et al, 2017; Hermena et al, in press) than is observed in the reading of English, where average word length is approximately five letters (Brysbaert, 2019; Johns & Dye, 2019). These results support a clear dissociation between the factors that determine where readers move their eyes (e.g., visual acuity and saccade‐programming parameters, as modulated by the spatial layout of a text) and the factors that determine when readers move their eyes (e.g., rate of lexical processing as modulated by a variety of linguistic properties of the text).…”

“…In the absence of diacritics or disambiguating context, determining the intended meaning of the word is not possible. (d) Sample of Arabic words to illustrate vertical stacking of letters and diacritics as appears in commonly used Arabic fonts and taught handwriting styles (see Hermena et al, 2017). (d1) shows vertical stacks of two and three letters are shown.…”

“…Given the findings reviewed so far, it is perhaps not surprising that the increased visual and informational density of Arabic jointly attenuate the parafoveal processing of Arabic words. This is best evidenced by the fact that, whereas readers of English and other European languages skip approximately 30% of the words in a given text (e.g., Rayner, 2009; Rayner & Pollatsek, 1981), readers of Arabic exhibit only modest word‐skipping rates (on average 8%; Hermena et al, 2015, 2016, 2017; Hermana, et al, in press). Similarly, the magnitude and reliability of the effects that reflect parafoveal processing are more limited to spatially proximal pre‐target fixation positions (Hermena et al, 2016), presumably because these positions afford the high visual acuity required to identify the small features of Arabic words.…”

Letter connectedness and Arabic visual word recognition

“…Specifically, it may be that these effects are more pronounced in monospaced fonts, like the Courier New font selected for targets in the study, compared with proportional fonts, like Times New Roman. Indeed, Hermena et al (2017) maintain that proportional fonts are considered more natural-looking for Arabic readers and are used more commonly in Arabic texts. Further study of this issue would have clear practical implications.…”

Parafoveal Processing: Morphological Effec

“…Данные по словоизменению дают противоречивые результаты. С одной стороны, на материале семитских языков было показано, что наличие / отсутствие словоизменительных показателей в слове не влияет на выбор места первой фиксации в иврите ] и в арабском [Paterson et al 2015;Hermena et al 2017]. С другой стороны, на материале алтайских языков было показано, что чем больше словоизменительных суффиксов в слове, тем ближе расположено место первой фиксации к началу слова по сравнению с непроизводными словами той же длины в уйгурском [Yan et al 2014] и в финском .…”