Universal patterns in eye movements across lines of text

This study examines cross-linguistic patterns of eye movements before, during, and after return sweeps-the saccades that move readers' gaze from one line of text to the next. Using data from 28 language samples representing 22 languages and multiple writing systems from the Multilingual Eye Movement Corpus project, we tested whether spatial and temporal characteristics of interline transitions reflect universal oculomotor mechanisms or language-specific factors. Results show that extreme fixations cover about 80% of each line across all languages, and fixation durations follow consistent positional patterns: shorter at line ends and longer at line beginnings. Neither linguistic nor script properties, nor reading direction (horizontal vs. vertical), significantly modulated these effects. These findings suggest that return-sweep patterns are highly stereotypical across writing systems and primarily determined by visuo-oculomotor rather than linguistic processes, representing a potential universal of human reading behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).