ABSTRACT

For more than a century, the study of eye movements has been of interest to researchers from various perspectives and fields of study. It is one of the earliest interests of reading researchers. But, like every kind of research, it is not simply that researchers know what they see. What the researchers see depends on what they know. Research paradigms differ in major and minor ways and lead to different understandings of the phenomena under study. How eye-movement researchers design their research, what they treat as data, and how they interpret the data strongly depends on their beginning theory and stance. To support word-centered theories, it would be necessary for the eye to move from word to word with areas of sharp focus on each word. The brain uses the eye to provide visual input, but it forms perceptions on the basis of what it expects given the experiential and linguistic knowledge it draws on during reading.