ABSTRACT
A major problem with experimental research is that it requires control of reality, which leads to research that highly constrains the phenomena it studies. In reading, that has meant designing studies that involve readers responding to small pieces of language: letters, sounds, syllables, and words. More than a century of research on eye movements has produced a remarkably consistent understanding of the eye as an optical instrument with a lens that must stop and focus to provide useful visual information to the brain. The underlying question in eye-movement research has usually been an example of the type of questions scientific realism generates: What does the eye do during reading? What structures and processes can we understand from observing the movements of the eye during reading? When eye-tracking studies have asked similar-yet-different questions such as, How does the eye function in identifying words?” experiments have been designed that focus on word identification rather than meaning.
