Undersweep fixations during reading in adults and children

Area of Science:

• Cognitive psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Return sweeps are eye movements connecting the end of one line to the beginning of the next.
• Undersweep fixations during return sweeps were previously thought to be uninvolved in linguistic processing.
• Recent research suggests these fixations aid skilled adult readers by providing previews of line-initial words.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the role of undersweep fixations in children's reading development.
• To compare how adults and children utilize undersweep fixations during reading.
• To determine if the attentional mechanisms observed in adults are present in developing readers.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of a children's reading corpus to examine word skipping and gaze durations after undersweep fixations.
• An eye movement experiment comparing adults and children's reading patterns.
• Investigating inhibition of return effects to assess attentional deployment during undersweep fixations.

Main Results:

• Children's reading data showed words with undersweep fixations were more likely skipped and had shorter gaze durations on a subsequent pass.
• Eye-tracking revealed both adults and children briefly attend to the underswept word before moving to the line-initial word.
• Inhibition of return effects indicated a brief allocation of attention to the fixated word before redeployment.

Conclusions:

• Readers extract information during undersweep fixations, aiding subsequent encoding and saccade targeting.
• The oculomotor and attentional mechanisms for reading across line boundaries are established early in reading development.
• Similar patterns in adults and children suggest foundational reading mechanisms are innate.