Oculomotor control, brain potentials, and timelines of word recognition during natural reading

Abstract

Reading requires the orchestration of vision, attention, and language processes, usually along with the programming of eye movements. The co-registration of eye movements and electroencephalography (EEG) during natural reading promises to deliver two complementary sets of information. Fixation durations reflect the difficulty of sublexical, lexical, and sentence-level properties, such as the frequency and predictability of the fixated word and (at least) its left and right neighbors; they reveal space-related constraints of distributed processing in the perceptual span. Co-registered fixation-related potentials (FRPs) yield time-related constraints of word recognition within fixation durations. Effects of word frequency and predictability in FRPs are shown to be qualitatively similar to those in event-related potentials (ERPs) measured during serial visual presentation of sentence words. However, FRPs and ERPs differ with respect to the timelines associated with frequency and predictability effects. It is anticipated that space-related and time-related constraints of word recognition during reading will guide the further development of computational models of eye-movement control during reading as well as their integration with computational models of (isolated) word recognition.