Understanding eye movements in skilled readers and novice readers: A behavioral and computational approach

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

When we read, it feels like we can see many words at once, but in fact we can only see a word or two at a time clearly enough to read. Skilled readers are very good at quickly and efficiently moving their eyes to see a word and move on to the next. This project is about how readers learn to make these quick and efficient eye movements. Many individuals around the world and in the United States struggle to become skilled readers. This project will investigate how young readers become skilled readers and what knowledge someone must gain in order to become a skilled reader. This understanding will help teachers and clinicians develop better strategies to help individuals who struggle to read. Readers consider many sources of information when planning eye movements, including visual properties like word length or what letters tend to appear together in words. One underappreciated source of information is linguistic—a reader’s knowledge of what words and phrases tend to follow each other, based on their language experience. This project will investigate the linguistic information that skilled readers use to guide eye movements and how skilled and less skilled readers are different. Skilled adult readers and younger adolescent readers will read sentences that vary in complexity and predictability (how well a reader is able to anticipate what words are coming next) while their eye movements are measured. Then, a computational model will model and predict eye movements during reading to better understand how linguistic factors and individual factors, like reading experience, affect how readers move their eyes. This work will be informative of the skills and knowledge underlie healthy reading development, which is necessary to develop remediations to help individuals who struggle to read. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.