Grosslanguage validation of computational models of eye-movement control of reading with extensions to oral reading and reading-span tasks

• Applicant: Professor Reinhold Kliegl, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2006 to 2010
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 21950621

This project is part of an ECRP proposal implementing common and local research goals. The common research goal is to establish a crosslanguage corpus of eye movements and fixations using a common protocol consisting of easy reading material of about 1000 words from a minimum of 50 readers with norms available for word frequency and word predictability from sentence context. The collaborative project realizes such a data base for the English, French, and German language. These data will be used for the crosslanguage evaluation of three fully implemented computational models of eye-movement control during reading (E-Z Reader, Split- Fovea-LATER, SWIFT). In a second phase these data will allow for systematic model evaluations. The local research goal is to collect eye movements for this data base under complex reading conditions (i.e., during oral reading and during reading-span tasks) to increase the percentage of fixations in second-pass reading (i.e., fixations after regressions to previously fixated parts of sentences). Aside from yielding badly needed information about eye-movement statistics in such complex reading tasks, these data will allow us to extend the SWIFT model to account for effects related to the eye-voice span during oral reading and for effects related to working-memory load.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Person: Professor Dr. Ralf Engbert