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Saccade launch site as a predictor of fixation durations in reading: Comments on Hand, Miellet, O’Donnell, and Sereno (2010).

Slattery, T., Staub, A. and Rayner, K., 2012. Saccade launch site as a predictor of fixation durations in reading: Comments on Hand, Miellet, O’Donnell, and Sereno (2010). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38 (1), 251-261.

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DOI: 10.1037/a0025980

Abstract

An important question in research on eye movements in reading is whether word frequency and word predictability have additive or interactive effects on fixation durations. A fair number of studies have reported only additive effects of the frequency and predictability of a target word on reading times on that word, failing to show significant interactions. Recently, however, Hand, Miellet, O'Donnell, and Sereno (see record 2010-19099-001) reported interactive effects in a study that included the distance of the prior fixation from the target word (launch site). They reported that when the saccade into the target word was launched from very near to the word (within 3 characters), the predictability effect was larger for low frequency words, but when the saccade was launched from a medium distance (4-6 characters from the word) the predictability effect was larger for high frequency words. Hand et al. argued for the importance of including launch site in analyses of target word fixation durations. Here we describe several problems with Hand et al.'s use of analyses of variance in which launch site is divided into distinct ordinal levels. We describe a more appropriate way to analyze such data-linear mixed-effect models-and we use this method to show that launch site does not modulate the interaction between frequency and predictability in two other data sets.

Item Type:Article
ISSN:0096-1523
Additional Information:Epub 2011 Nov 14
Group:Bournemouth University Business School
ID Code:22643
Deposited By: Symplectic RT2
Deposited On:13 Oct 2015 12:59
Last Modified:14 Mar 2022 13:53

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