Eye movements are guided by morphological complexity in traditional Mongolian reading

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Current consensus posits eye movement control in reading relies solely on low-level visual features.
• Recent studies in agglutinative languages (Uighur, Finnish) challenge this, showing high-level linguistic factors like morphological complexity influence saccades.
• Traditional Mongolian, a vertical script language, remains understudied in this context.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the generalizability of morphological complexity's influence on eye movements.
• To examine saccade behavior in traditional Mongolian, a language with vertical text.
• To employ a corpus-analytic approach for enhanced ecological validity and larger datasets.

Main Methods:

• Corpus-analytic approach utilizing large datasets of traditional Mongolian text.
• Analysis of eye movement data, specifically fixation locations and saccade paths.
• Statistical examination of the relationship between morphological complexity and saccade metrics.

Main Results:

• Morphological complexity significantly influences saccade targeting in Mongolian reading.
• First fixations land closer to the word beginning for morphologically complex words.
• This effect is more pronounced for shorter and less frequent words.

Conclusions:

• Mongolian readers demonstrate sensitivity to morphological complexity during parafoveal word processing.
• Saccade execution can be modulated by high-level linguistic information, extending beyond low-level visual guidance.
• Findings support a more integrated model of eye movement control in reading across diverse languages.