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Read sideways or not: vertical saccade advantage in sentence reading

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Abstract

During the reading of alphabetic scripts and scene perception, eye movements are programmed more efficiently in horizontal direction than in vertical direction. We propose that such a directional advantage may be due the overwhelming reading experience in the horizontal direction. Writing orientation is highly flexible for Traditional Chinese sentences. We compare horizontal and vertical eye movements during reading of such sentences and provide first evidence of a text-orientation effect on eye-movement control during reading. In addition to equivalent reading speed in both directions, more fine-grained analyses demonstrate a tradeoff between longer fixation durations and better fixation locations in vertical than in horizontal reading. Our results suggest that with extensive reading experience, Traditional Chinese readers can generate saccades more efficiently in vertical than in horizontal direction.

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Notes

  1. We thank a reviewer for pointing this out.

  2. In the present study we did not aim at teasing apart different theories on saccade generation in Chinese (Yan et al., 2010).

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Grant KL 955/18 and by the start-up research grant from the Education University of Hong Kong (RG 84/2017-2018R). The authors thank Prof. Xiaolin Zhou for his effort during data collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau, SAR, China

    Ming Yan

  2. Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, SAR, Hong Kong

    Jinger Pan

  3. School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Wenshuo Chang

  4. Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Reinhold Kliegl

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  1. Ming Yan
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  2. Jinger Pan
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  3. Wenshuo Chang
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  4. Reinhold Kliegl
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jinger Pan.

Additional information

Data and R scripts used in the current study are available at the Potsdam Mind Research Repository upon the acceptance of the paper (http://read.psych.uni-potsdam.de/PMR2/), or from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Appendix

Appendix

Eye-movement researchers subscribe to a large variety of operational definitions of fixations and saccades (Hessels et al., 2018; van der Lans, Wedel, & Pieters, 2011). Here we document fixation location results from a further test, in which raw gaze data are parsed using two a priori velocity thresholds fixed at 30º/s and 50º/s, respectively. The purpose is to show a clear advantage for vertical over horizontal saccades, especially for far launch site, consistently across different velocity definitions of saccades (left panel: velocity threshold 30°/sec and right panel: velocity threshold 50°/sec), replicating our main findings reported in the present study using saccade detection algorithm (Engbert & Kliegl, 2003).

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Yan, M., Pan, J., Chang, W. et al. Read sideways or not: vertical saccade advantage in sentence reading. Read Writ 32, 1911–1926 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-018-9930-x

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