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. 2022 Sep;86(6):1804-1815.
doi: 10.1007/s00426-021-01610-6. Epub 2021 Oct 25.

Return-sweep saccades in oral reading

Victoria I Adedeji  1 , Martin R Vasilev  2 , Julie A Kirkby  2 , Timothy J Slattery  2
Affiliations

Return-sweep saccades in oral reading

Victoria I Adedeji et al. Psychol Res. 2022 Sep.

Abstract

Recent research on return-sweep saccades has improved our understanding of eye movements when reading paragraphs. However, these saccades, which take our gaze from the end of one line to the start of the next line, have been studied only within the context of silent reading. Articulatory demands and the coordination of the eye-voice span (EVS) at line boundaries suggest that the execution of this saccade may be different in oral reading. We compared launch and landing positions of return-sweeps, corrective saccade probability and fixations adjacent to return-sweeps in skilled adult readers while reading paragraphs aloud and silently. Compared to silent reading, return-sweeps were launched from closer to the end of the line and landed closer to the start of the next line when reading aloud. The probability of making a corrective saccade was higher for oral reading than silent reading. These indicate that oral reading may compel readers to rely more on foveal processing at the expense of parafoveal processing. We found an interaction between reading modality and fixation type on fixation durations. The reading modality effect (i.e., increased fixation durations in oral compared to silent reading) was greater for accurate line-initial fixations and marginally greater for line-final fixations compared to intra-line fixations. This suggests that readers may use the fixations adjacent to return-sweeps as natural pause locations to modulate the EVS.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
An example paragraph used in the experiment
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Violin plots with box plots embedded showing the distribution of return-sweep saccade launch position and landing position. Centre of box plots indicates median, while points indicate the mean
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Split violin plots with box plots embedded showing the distribution of fixation durations by reading modality and fixation types. Centre of box plots indicates median while points indicate the mean. Y-axis limit was set at 600 ms for graphical purposes as upper bound in analyses was 1000 ms
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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