F. Vitu et al., MINDLESS READING - EYE-MOVEMENT CHARACTERISTICS ARE SIMILAR IN SCANNING LETTER STRINGS AND READING TEXTS, Perception & psychophysics, 57(3), 1995, pp. 352-364
The purpose of the present study was to compare the oculomotor behavio
r of readers scanning meaningful and meaningless materials. Four condi
tions were used-a normal-text-reading control condition, and three exp
erimental conditions in which the amount of linguistic processing was
reduced, either by presenting the subjects with repeated letter string
s or by asking the subjects to search for a target letter in texts or
letter strings. The results show that global eye-movement characterist
ics (such as saccade size and fixation duration), as well as local cha
racteristics (such as word-skipping rate, landing site, refixation pro
bability, and refixation position), are very similar in the four condi
tions. The finding that the eyes are capable of generating autonomous
oculomotor scanning strategy in the absence of any linguistic informat
ion to process argues in favor of the idea that such predetermined ocu
lomotor strategies might be an important determinant of eye movements
in reading.