[Eye movements during reading].
Kieran O'Regan, Ariane Lévy-Schoen · PubMed · 1978
Summary After a lapse of interest during the past decades, the study of eye movements during reading is now coming back into favour. In addition to looking at global variations in reading behaviour as a function of aspects of the text, characteristics of the reader and his attitude towards the text, researchers are now also beginning to study the local adjustments of the eye as a function of characteristics of the text encountered from moment to moment during reading. Some recent work suggests ihat at every instant the eye is guided in such a way as to adapt to the necessities of the psycholinguistic processing taking place at each position of the text. Changes in saccade size and in the duration of fixations at particular locations in a text thus reflect the cognitive operations occurring during reading.