The potential contribution of preplanned refixations to the preferred viewing location

Abstract

The preferred viewing location (PVL) is a term originated by Rayner (1979) to describe the position in a word where the eyes first land during reading. A number of eyetracking studies have shown that readers tend to make their initial fixation between the beginning and middle of the word, whether they are reading left-to-right orthographies such as English (e.g., Dunn-Rankin, 1978;McConkie, Kerr, Reddix, & Zola, 1988;O'Regan, 1981;Rayner, 1979;Vitu, 1991b;Vitu, McConkie, Kerr, & O'Regan, 2001) or right-to-left languages such as Hebrew (Deutsch & Rayner, 1999).The PVL is visually apparent when the relative frequency distributions of initial fixation locations are plotted for length-segregated words. Figure 1 displays the landing position distributions for words of 4-8 letters in length according to the data from the EMBRA eye movement corpus (see the Method section for a description of this corpus). The probability of the eyes initially fixating a given letter position is estimated by the relative frequency in the corpus. These data exhibit the typical properties of the landing position distributions that have been reported by other researchers (e.g., McConkie et al., 1988;Rayner, 1979;Vitu et al., 2001). First, the curves for shorter words are flatter than those for longer words (the mode of the curve is more easily distinguished for longer words); second, the majority of the probability mass is distributed over the first half of the word. The PVL phenomenon is apparent for longer (5-to 8-letter) words: the "preferred" initial landing position is between the beginning and middle of the word. The mean landing positions for 4-through 10-letter words are provided in Table 1; for all word lengths, the mean is between word-beginning and word-center. It is also clear from Table 1 that the (meansummarized) PVL varies according to word length, moving rightward for longer words.As first pointed out by McConkie et al. (1988), plots such as Figure 1 are actually best described as composite landing position distributions because the curves can be decomposed as a function of launch distance (the distance, in character spaces, from the previous fixation to the target word). Composite landing position distributions obscure a strong effect of launch distance that McConkie et al. (1988) attribute to a systematic range error: undershooting far targets and overshooting near ones (Kapoula, 1985;Kapoula & Robinson, 1986). Assuming that the center of a word is the saccade target, saccades launched from more than approximately 7 character spaces in front of word-center tend to undershoot the target location, and saccades launched from fewer than 7 character spaces tend to overshoot the target. This range error is on the order of 0.35-0.5 characters per character shift of launch distance (McConkie et al., 1988;Radach & McConkie, 1998). McConkie et al. (1988) demonstrate that for a center-based launch distance of about 7 characters, the mean of the resulting landing position distribution is located near wordcenter.Saccadic undershooting...

Font size modulates saccade-target selection in Chinese reading

“…Similar to results from reading of alphabetic scripts (McDonald & Shillcock, 2004;Nuthmann & Kliegl, 2009;Rayner, 1979), single-fixation PVL also located near the word center in Chinese reading, replicating the results of Yan et al (2010). Moreover, in the present study, we were able to establish the word-centered PVL for four different font sizes.…”

Effects of number-of-letters on eye movements during reading are independent from effects of spatial word length

“…Mean landing position moves roughly 0.9 pixels closer to word-beginning with every letter increment in length, which at first glance contrasts with the typical finding that mean landing position moves rightwards with word length (approximately 1/3 letter position per letter: cf. McDonald & Shillcock, 2004;Rayner, 1979;Rayner et al, 1996). However, if landing position in pixels is referenced to ordinal letter position (see Figure 3 and Table 1), then it is clear that ordinal letter position also increases as NoL increases: On average, 1/4 letter position per letter of word length.…”

Reading polymorphemic Dutch compounds: Toward a multiple route model of lexical processing.

“…This position is closest to the preferred viewing position (the most frequent position where the eyes initially land) reported in eye movements studies for Finnish, English and French words with the lengths that we used, mostly 12 characters, (e.g., Bertram & Hyönä, 2003;McDonald & Shillcock, 2004;VergilinoPerez, Collins & Doré-Mazars, 2004). …”