INFLUENCE OF AUDITORY INFORMATION ON READING SPEED AND EYE MOVEMENT CONTROL IN READING

Abstract

We investigated how auditory information affected the speed of silent reading, using sentences extracted from Japanese novels. Subjects were instructed to read the sentences silently presented on a display while hearing the voice of reading through headphones and we measured the reading time and eye movements. The speed of the reading voice varied over the range of a factor of eight to examine whether auditory information affects reading speed. The results showed that the speed of reading and saccade length increased approximately in proportion to voice speed and the number of fixations decreased with the increase of voice speed. The increase of saccade length can be interpreted as the increase in the range of characters to be processed during a fixation (or effective visual field size). From these results, we suggest that the voice information may increase the effective visual field size for reading.