Word length and frequency effects on text reading are highly similar in 12 alphabetic languages

Abstract

One of the most robust findings in research on eye-movement control in reading is that shorter and more frequent words are recognized faster and skipped more often than longer and less frequent words. These benchmark effects of word length and frequency are reported in all languages studied to date and inform computational models of eye-movements in reading. This paper asks whether each of these effects is similar in magnitude across languages. We analyzed 12 typologically diverse alphabetic languages from the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO). The languages varied substantially in their word length and frequency distributions as a function of orthographic conventions and the morpho-syntactic type. Despite this variability, the effects of word length and frequency on fixation durations and skipping rate were highly comparable in size between the languages. This finding suggests a high degree of cross-linguistic universality in the readers' behavioral response to visual and linguistic complexity (indexed by word length) and the amount of familiarity with the word (indexed by word frequency). It also suggests feasibility of, and provides empirical data for, generalizable cross-linguistic computational models of eye-movement control in reading.

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