Direct lexical and non-lexical control of fixation duration in reading

This chapter focuses on the eye-mind link in reading, or how perceptual and cognitive processes influence when and where the eyes move when people read. The chapter is organized into four parts. First, early theoretical accounts of the eye-mind link are reviewed, and key findings that are problematic for these accounts are discussed. Timing constraints on the eye-mind link that have been derived from behavioral and neurophysiological studies are examined, along with the implications of these constraints for current models of eye-movement control in reading. Next, evidence is provided for the direct control of eye movements during reading from a number of eye-movement experiments that have used distributional analyses and survival analyses to examine the time course over which perceptual and/or lexical variables affect fixation durations during reading. Finally, the findings of the review are summarized, and possible directions for future research on this topic are presented.