MINDLESS READING - EYE-MOVEMENT CHARACTERISTICS ARE SIMILAR IN SCANNING LETTER STRINGS AND READING TEXTS

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.