Journal article
Return-sweep saccades during reading in adults and children
- Abstract:
- During reading, eye movement patterns differ between children and adults. Children make more fixations that are longer in duration and make shorter saccades. Return-sweeps are saccadic eye movements that move a reader's fixation to a new line of text. Return-sweeps move fixation further than intra-line saccades and often undershoot their target. This necessitates a corrective saccade to bring fixation closer to the start of the line. There have been few empirical investigations of return-sweep saccades in adults, and even fewer in children. In the present study, we examined return-sweeps of 47 adults and 48 children who read identical multiline texts. We found that children launch their return-sweeps closer to the end of the line and target a position closer to the left margin. Therefore, children fixate more extreme positions on the screen when reading for comprehension. Furthermore, children required a corrective saccade following a return-sweep more often than adults. Analysis of the duration of the fixation preceding the corrective saccade indicated that children are as efficient as adults at responding to retinal feedback following a saccade. Rather than consider differences in adult's and children's return-sweep behaviour an artefact of oculomotor control, we believe that these differences represent adult's ability to utilise parafoveal processing to encode text at extreme positions.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Accepted manuscript, pdf, 429.4KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1016/j.visres.2018.12.007
Authors
- Publisher:
- Elsevier
- Journal:
- Vision Research More from this journal
- Volume:
- 155
- Pages:
- 35-43
- Publication date:
- 2019-01-12
- Acceptance date:
- 2018-12-17
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1878-5646
- ISSN:
-
0042-6989
- Pmid:
-
30625336
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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pubs:1026378
- UUID:
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uuid:a38ddc9c-525e-4671-88a1-0b48fd5934cc
- Local pid:
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pubs:1026378
- Source identifiers:
-
1026378
- Deposit date:
-
2019-07-03
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Elsevier
- Copyright date:
- 2019
- Notes:
- © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This is the accepted manuscript version of the article. The final version is available from Elsevier at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2018.12.007
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