Using measures of reading time regularity (RTR) to quantify eye movement dynamics, and how they are shaped by linguistic information

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In this article, we present the concept of reading time regularity (RTR) as a measure to capture reading process dynamics. The first study is concerned with examining one of the assumptions of RTR, namely, that process measures of reading, such as eye movement fluctuations and fixation durations, exhibit higher regularity when contingent on sequentially structured information, such as texts. To test this, eye movements of 26 German native speakers were recorded during reading-unrelated and reading-related tasks. To analyze the data, we used recurrence quantification analysis and sample entropy analysis to quantify the degree of temporal structure in time series of gaze steps and fixation durations. The results showed that eye movements become more regular in reading compared to nonreading conditions. These effects were most prominent when calculated on the basis of gaze step data. In a second study, eye movements of 27 native speakers of German were recorded for five conditions with increasing linguistic information. The results replicate the findings of the first study, verifying that these effects are not due to mere differences in task instructions between conditions. Implications for the concept of RTR and for future studies using these metrics in reading research are discussed

Original languageEnglish
Article number9
JournalJournal of Vision
Volume22
Issue number6
Number of pages21
ISSN1534-7362
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01.05.2022

Bibliographical note

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) by grants to Sebastian Wallot (project numbers 397523278 and 442405852).

Publisher Copyright: © Copyright 2022 The Authors

    Research areas

  • Information processing, Reading time regularity, Recurrence quantification analysis, Sample entropy analysis, Text reading
  • Psychology

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