Effects of word predictability on eye movements during Arabic reading

AlJassmi, M, Warrington, KL ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3206-8002, McGowan, VA, White, SJ and Paterson, KB, 2021. Effects of word predictability on eye movements during Arabic reading. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. ISSN 1943-3921

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Abstract

Contextual predictability influences both the probability and duration of eye fixations on words when reading Latinate alphabetic scripts like English and German. However, it is unknown whether word predictability influences eye movements in reading similarly for Semitic languages like Arabic, which are alphabetic languages with very different visual and linguistic characteristics. Such knowledge is nevertheless important for establishing the generality of mechanisms of eye-movement control across different alphabetic writing systems. Accordingly, we investigated word predictability effects in Arabic in two eye-movement experiments. Both produced shorter fixation times for words with high compared to low predictability, consistent with previous findings. Predictability did not influence skipping probabilities for (four- to eight-letter) words of varying length and morphological complexity (Experiment 1). However, it did for short (three- to four-letter) words with simpler structures (Experiment 2). We suggest that word-skipping is reduced, and affected less by contextual predictability, in Arabic compared to Latinate alphabetic reading, because of specific orthographic and morphological characteristics of the Arabic script.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics
Creators:	AlJassmi, M., Warrington, K.L., McGowan, V.A., White, S.J. and Paterson, K.B.
Publisher:	Springer (part of Springer Nature)
Date:	10 October 2021
ISSN:	1943-3921
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.3758/s13414-021-02375-1 DOI 1469815 Other
Rights:	Post-prints are subject to Springer Nature re-use terms
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Laura Ward
Date Added:	11 Oct 2021 15:34
Last Modified:	10 Oct 2022 03:00
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/44400

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