ABSTRACT
In support of the controlling function of the internal activities, experimental results are presented that account for parts of the variability in saccade size and fixation duration by demonstrating relationships between visual, syntactic, and/or semantic characteristics of the text and the eye movement pattern. Rayner demonstrated that the fixation duration on a critical word depended on the visual features of a stimulus pattern which was displayed in the critical word position during the previous fixation and which was replaced by the critical word during the subsequent saccade. Control models of the reading eye movements generally assume that saccade size and fixation duration are independent eye movement components that have to be accounted for separately, even though it seems to be plausible that the fixation duration should be longer if a line is read with fewer fixations, i.e. with larger saccades.
