An influence over eye movements in reading exerted from beyond the level of the word: evidence from English and French

We report the results of a series of multiple regression analyses conducted on the Dundee Corpus, a corpus of eye-movement data obtained from ten British and ten French young adults as they read newspaper articles (the equivalent of more than 52,000 words per language) presented on a screen, five lines at a time. Inspection parameters (inter-word saccade latency, saccade extent, skipping probability, first fixation and gaze duration and number of fixation) were all determined in part by properties defined beyond the level of individual words, e.g., the relative or mean length of adjacent words rather than individual word length. Properties defined at this level do not feature in any current model of eye-movement control in reading. Moreover, foveal inspection time was found to vary as a function of the properties of words in the parafovea (lexical frequency for English; initial trigram informativeness for French). We account for these results by proposing a process monitoring mechanism, in which a number of visual parameters simultaneously contribute to optimize visibility over a sequence of adjacent words.