Individual Differences in Eye-Movements During Reading: Working Memory and Speed-of-Processing Effects

• Main Authors: Matthew J. Traxler (Author), Clinton L. Johns (Author), Debra L. Long (Author), Megan Zirnstein (Author), Kristen M. Tooley (Author), Eunike Jonathan (Author)
• Format: Book
• Published: Bern Open Publishing, 2012-04-01T00:00:00Z.
• Subjects: article
• Online Access: Connect to this object online.
• Notes: 10.16910/jemr.5.1.5; 1995-8692
• Keywords: eye-movements; reading; individual differences; working memory; Human anatomy; QM1-695
• Source: Journal of Eye Movement Research, Vol 5, Iss 1 (2012)

Mathematical models of eye-movement control do not yet incorporate individual differences as a source of variation in reading. These models nonetheless provide an excellent foundation for describing and explaining how and why patterns of eye-movements differ across readers (e.g., Rayner et al., 2006). We focus in this article on two aspects of individual variation: global processing speed (e.g., Salthouse, 1996) and working-memory capacity (e.g., Just & Carpenter, 1992). Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) (Raudenbush & Bryk, 2001), we tested the extent to which overall reading speed and working-memory capacity moderate the degree to which syntactic and semantic information affect fixation times. We found that working-memory capacity interacted with sentence-characteristic variables only when processing speed was not included in the model.