Anastasia Stoops^1,2, Sarn Mukhopadhyay^1,2, Volodimir Kindratenko^1,2, Jon Willits^1,2, Jessica Montag^1,2; ¹University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ²National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Urbana, IL, USA

During reading skilled readers skip and never fixate on between 20-30% of words. In controlled experiments, a combination of low-level visual factors such as word length and higher-level linguistic factors such as word frequency and lexical predictability affects skilled readers’ skipping: shorter and lexically more predictable words are skipped more often. Recently, syntactic predictability (expectations about the upcoming word’s part of speech and not the exact word) has been proposed as an additional source of linguistic predictability that affects skipping. To understand how skipping behavior emerges with experience, we investigated skipping behavior in both adults and adolescents, who are skilled readers but not yet adult-like in their behavior. The present study examined how visual (word length) and linguistic (word frequency, lexical and syntactic predictability) knowledge during reading affects skipping in skilled and adolescent readers. 113 college students and 52 adolescents (14-17 yoa) read 55 passages from PROVO corpus (Luke & Christianson, 2018) along with vocabulary (Shipley, 1941) and reading comprehension (shortened 10 minute version of Nelson&Denny, 1980) tests, combined into one reading experience composite score. Logistic mixed-effects regression examined the effects of reading experience, word length, word frequency, lexical and syntactic predictability controlling for the position in the sentence. Our results replicated prior findings from experimental and naturalistic work: readers skip predictable short words more often than predictable long words. Further, two novel findings emerged. First, word length interacted with reading experience such that better readers skip more longer words than poorer readers. Second, word length interacted with syntactic predictability such that longer, syntactically predictable words are skipped more than less predictable words. This work highlights the role of readers’ experience with linguistic knowledge and word's syntactic predictability in eye movements. We show tighter than previously assumed coupling between readers’ eyes movements and higher-level linguistic predictability beyond specific lexical items.

Acknowledgements: funding: NSF grant #2141268 to AS, JM, and JW