When
Where
Victor Kuperman
Professor, Humanities & Linguistics and Languages
Member, McMaster Institute for Research on Aging (MIRA), McMaster University
Member, McMaster Centre for Advanced Research in Experimental and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities
Associate Member, Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, Faculty of Science
McMaster University
Zoom: https://arizona.zoom.us/j/89422265505
Multilingual perspective on the casic facts of eye-movement control during reading
Abstract: Recent cross-linguistic resources have made possible a systematic study of universal and language-specific aspects of reading behavior in highly diverse written languages and writing systems (Liversedge et al., 2016). This talk presents a comparison of eye-tracking data on 20 alphabetic, abjad, abugida, and logographic languages from the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (Siegelman et al., 2022). I revisit basic facts of eye-movement control in text reading (Rayner, 1998; 2009) through the cross-linguistic lens. The goals are to determine (i) whether these basic facts hold across a wide variety of written languages, and (ii) whether cross-linguistic variability is grounded in the structural differences of those written languages. I present analyses of such diverse oculomotor phenomena as regressions, refixations, and landing positions, the saccadic main sequence, as well as effects of word length and frequency. Our findings point to several eye-movement patterns that are uniform across dissimilar scripts, while other patterns varied systematically as a function of the written languages’ structural properties.
Victor Kuperman is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages, Canada Research Chair in Psycholinguistics, and the Director of the Reading Lab at McMaster University. His research focuses on psycholinguistics and quantitative linguistics, eye-movement behaviour in reading, individual differences in word and sentence processing, and statistical and experimental methods in language research. Kuperman’s recent focus is on cross-linguistic studies of reading behavior, as well as socio-economic and cognitive predictors of literacy. His research lab studies eye-tracking, behavioural studies, large-scale norming studies and quantitative analyses of writing and speech.