View article

This chapter explores theories of eye movement control in reading. Eye movements during reading are characterized by short periods of steadiness (fixations), followed by fast movements (saccades). Saccades bring new information into the centre of the visual field where acuity is best; fixations are required to recognize words. If the central (foveal) word is identified during a fixation, one is led erroneously to believe that eye movements essentially consist of word-to-word movements. In fact, such simple sequence of motion is rarely observed in practical data. Findings reveal, some words are fixated more than once, some are initially not fixated but immediately afterwards regressed to, and some are not fixated at all. Since eye movements were scientifically calibrated during the process of reading, it has emerged that more than one third of the words are initially skipped during reading. The study …