Nonlinear Dynamics of Text Reading: Recurrence Quantification Analysis of Eye Movements

EasyChair Preprint 3848

Abstract

This study is concerned with the question how endogenous eye movement dynamics change as they become contingent on external (linguistic) information. It is hypothesized that external information lead to increased sequential order of eye movement measures, compared to conditions that contain little or no information. To test this hypothesis, eye movements of 26 German native speakers were recorded during reading-unrelated and reading-related tasks. To analyze the data, we used recurrence quantification analysis (RQA), which quantifies the degree of temporal structure in time series. Recurrence measures of eye movements convincingly distinguish between conditions. Findings suggest that qualitatively different tasks can be measured on a continuum of temporal structure and provide new perspectives for further studies investigating natural reading as complex, dynamical process.

Keyphrases: (linguistic) information processing, information processing, nonlinear dynamics, reading time regularity, recurrence quantification analysis, text reading

@booklet{EasyChair:3848,
  author    = {Monika Tschense and Sebastian Wallot},
  title     = {Nonlinear Dynamics of Text Reading: Recurrence Quantification Analysis of Eye Movements},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 3848},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2020}}