Individual Differences in Eye-Movements During Reading: Working Memory and Speed-of-Processing Effects

Theories of eye-movement control in reading should ultimately describe how differences in knowledge and cognitive abilities affect reading and comprehension. Current mathematical models of eye-movement control do not yet incorporate individual differences as a source of variation in reading, although developmental and group-difference effects have been studied. These models nonetheless provide an excellent foundation for describing and explaining how and why patterns of eye-movements differ across readers (e.g., Rayner, Chace, & Ashby, 2006). Our focus in this article is on two aspects of individual variation: global processing speed (e.g., Salthouse, 1996) and working-memory capacity (e.g., Just & Carpenter, 1992). Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) (Raudenbush & Bryk, 2001), we tested the extent to which overall reading speed and working-memory capacity moderate the degree to which syntactic and semantic information affect fixation times. Previous published data (Traxler et al., 2005) showed that working memory capacity and syntactic complexity interacted to determine fixation times in an eye-movement monitoring experiment. In a new set of models based on this same data set, we found that working-memory capacity interacted with sentence-characteristic variables only when processing speed was not included in the model. We interpret these findings with respect to current accounts of sentence processing and suggest how they might be incorporated into eye-movement control models.