ABSTRACT
One of the most fascinating areas of research into the higher mental processes deals with linguistic communication and, more specifically, with the question of how the reader extracts meaning from written language. I will discuss research on the role that language plays in guiding the reader's eyes. The two major issues to be considered here are (1) whether the reader selectively allocates his visual attention in extracting meaning from written language; and (2) if so, whether areas of relatively greater or lesser visual attention are predictable from the linguistic structure of the material being read. The research to be presented here was designed to examine the eye-fixation patterning of proficient readers while they read materials that contained specific kinds of linguistic features considered central to comprehension.
