What is the optimal position of low‐frequency words across line boundaries? An eye movement investigation

Abstract

When displaying text on a page or a screen, only a finite number of characters can be presented on a single line. If the text exceeds that finite value, then text wrapping occurs. Often this process results in longer, more difficult to process words being positioned at the start of a line. We conducted an eye movement study to examine how this artefact of text wrapping affects passage reading. This allowed us to answer the question: should word difficulty be used when determining line breaks? Thirty-nine participants read 20 passages where low-frequency target words were either line-initial or line-final. There was no statistically reliable effect of our manipulation on passage reading time or comprehension despite several effects at a local level. Regarding our primary research question, the evidence suggests that word difficulty may not need to be accounted for when determining line breaks and assigning words to new lines.

Column setting and text justification influence return-sweep eye movement behavior during Chinese multi-line reading

“…Our results demonstrated that the way in which the text was presented did not result in global differences in reading efficiency and effectiveness (e.g., reading speed and comprehension accuracy), and effects were confined to return-sweep eye movement behavior (e.g., return-sweep and corrective saccades). Overall, our results are similar to those reported in a recent study that examined whether typesetting factors across line boundaries influence the reading of multi-line text in English (Parker et al, 2023 ). In their study, the position of low-frequency words across line boundaries (either at the start or the end of a line) had little impact on global reading performance (i.e., reading time and comprehension) but did have robust effects on local eye movements (e.g., return-sweeps).…”

“…Compared to intra-line fixations (223 ms), line-final fixations were shorter (206 ms), and accurate line-initial fixations were longer (235 ms). These results are consistent with those observed in alphabetic languages (e.g., Abrams & Zuber, 1972 ; Kuperman et al, 2010 ; Parker & Slattery, 2019 ; Parker et al, 2017 , 2020 , 2023 ). Assuming that these results reflect visual and cognitive processes at mid-line, line-final and line-initial positions and given that the fundamental format characteristics of text across alphabetic and character-based languages are comparable (horizontal text lines read from left to right), the consistency of effects across orthographies is perhaps not surprising.…”

Frequency and Predictability Effects for Line Final Words

“…The return-sweep planning account is, however, difficult to reconcile with findings from the current study as frequency and predictability effects emerge for line-final words, indicating that fixations on these words are being terminated based on lexical properties of the line-final word. The observation that word-level properties influence reading times on line-final words is not novel to this study Parker et al (2023). reported longer line-final fixation durations when low-frequency targets are positioned at the end of the line compared to a condition where low-frequency words are positioned at the start of a line.…”

The use of eye movement corpora in vocabulary research

“…Finally, where-decisions have a strong impact at the end and beginning of a text line, as there is a large return sweep to be made from one line to the next. These are likely to affect the gaze duration of the first and last word of a text line and therefore it is common to remove these words from eye movement analyses unless one is interested in the return sweep itself (Parker et al, 2023;Slattery & Vasilev, 2019).…”