Neurolinguistics Thursday: "Cross-linguistic studies of spatial eye-movement control during reading"

Lector: Dr. Victor Kuperman, Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages and the Director of the Reading Lab at McMaster University.
Registration link
Topic: Cross-linguistic studies of spatial eye-movement control during reading

Recent cross-linguistic resources have made possible a systematic study of universal and language-specific aspects of reading behavior in diverse written languages and writing systems. This talk presents a comparison of eye-tracking data on 20 alphabetic, logographic, abjad and abugida languages from the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO). The focus of the talk is on the spatial characteristics of saccadic movements the eye makes during reading. The goals are to determine (i) whether the widely accepted basic facts of spatial control hold across a wide variety of written languages, and (ii) whether cross-linguistic variability is grounded in the structural differences of those written languages. The findings point to several eye-movement patterns that are uniform across dissimilar scripts, while other patterns varied systematically as a function of the written languages’ structural properties.

Format: online (the link will be sent in an email after registration).