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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 12, 2025

Eye-tracking to Distinguish Comprehension-based and Oculomotor-based Regressive Eye Movements During Reading
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The function/content word distinction and eye movements in reading.

Adrian Staub1

  • 1Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition
|October 26, 2023
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Summary

Readers do not skip function words more often, challenging assumptions about reading eye movements. Eye tracking reveals word class doesn't influence skipping, suggesting syntactic category is less important for eye movement control.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Neuroscience

Background:

  • Reader eye movements are crucial for understanding reading.
  • Distinguishing between function and content words in reading is complex.
  • Previous research on eye movement sensitivity to word class is inconclusive.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if eye movements differ for function versus content words.
  • To test the hypothesis that function words are skipped more or fixated for shorter durations.
  • To examine the role of word class in eye movement control during reading.

Main Methods:

  • Two large-scale eyetracking experiments were conducted.
  • Sentences from a natural text corpus were used, featuring target function or content words.
  • Target words were matched for length, frequency, and predictability (using GPT-2).

Main Results:

  • No significant difference in skipping probability between function and content words was found.
  • Some evidence suggested longer fixation durations for content words.
  • Word class did not clearly influence skipping probability or fixation duration.

Conclusions:

  • Readers' tendency to overlook function word errors is not due to reduced encoding time.
  • Results support models where syntactic category plays a minimal role in eye movement control.
  • Reading models may not need to prioritize word class for predicting eye movements.