How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems by Donoghue Daniel;

Author:Donoghue, Daniel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2018-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

Even though “Roadside” is the longest word in the passage, the first fixation lands on its latter half rather than in the middle. With words of, say, four to seven letters in length, the typical place of fixation is in the middle or a little to the left of center; compound words like “Roadside” typically have more than one fixation, one for each part of the compound. The fixation on “-side,” however, is less anomalous than it may seem because the first fixation of a line (and the last) can land as many as seven spaces from the edge of writing, thanks to the preview benefit of the parafovea.5 The next few fixations in the first line are about as expected, falling either in the middle of a word or a little to the left of center. Number 5 falls after a long saccade, which may be the result of the predictability of “pain” in this context and the frequency of “and,” making the two words easier to process in the parafovea. The absence of a comma after “pain” and the humorous yoking of “angry drivers” to “sweat” and “pain,” as if they are equivalent comparanda, may also have something to do with the second saccade on “drivers.” Whatever its cause, the second saccade on “drivers” may allow for the longer saccade into the clichéd phrase “in the name of.” The most striking feature of the second line is the long saccade from number 10 over “healthy” to 11 “seem,” followed by a regression back to 12 “healthy”; then another long saccade from 13 “body” to 14 “reward” (reflected in the sequence 10 12 13 11 14.) There are two fixations on “enough” and another two on “people.” The second line gave this reader some difficulty, perhaps because the phrasing “may seem reward enough” is somewhat formal and even literary for this context, with more than a hint of sarcasm. The fixation with the longest duration (302 milliseconds) is 14 “reward” and the two on “enough” are among the shortest (112 and 177 milliseconds, respectively). Most of the other saccades are in the range of 200 to 300 milliseconds. The regressions and uneven saccades are not unusual, but a typical reader is scarcely aware of them except in the case of real difficulty because the brain typically processes out such disjunctions. Under normal conditions a reader is not aware of the staccato movement and instead experiences reading as a smooth process.

My analysis may be too fine-grained and speculative because many things could affect this reader’s saccades and fixations. It should not be taken as anything more than a plausible account of what may have happened during an unknown subject’s reading. It is sufficient, however, to show that the oculomotor process during reading (or any visual task) does not proceed with predictable, machine-like regularity. A reader rarely makes conscious decisions about where to move the eye in sustained reading, although anyone is capable of deliberately focusing on a word if they feel so inclined.

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