Researchers from the Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg State University, and the University of Potsdam have created a database which includes eye-tracking information gathered while reading in Russian. The outcomes are accessible and can be used in linguistics, as well as in the analysis of speech issues related to pronunciation, and such.
While reading, the eyes bounce from word to word in a short span of time, about 220 ms. Visual data is handled amid this short time interval where the gaze rests on the word. If a word is short or common, the eye remembers it using peripheral vision and skips it, and when reading in alphabetic languages, the eyes skips about 30 percent of words.
In different languages, reading sentences with same meanings take a similar measure of time. Messages in a language like Finnish, however, require many short gazes, but in Chinese, the fixations of the gaze are fewer, but they also have the tendency to last longer.
A latest psycholinguistic research has demonstrated that the way of reading, even in different languages do not differ. However, the characteristics of an individual language draw much attention, and the research on reading in Russian is an initial benchmark.
"Until now we did not know anything about reading in Russian, even though it is the sixth most widely spoken language in the world. This is why we carried out this basic, yet necessary, work. We took a set of different sentences from existing texts and recorded how native Russian speakers read them," explains Anna Laurinavichyute, a research fellow in the HSE Centre for Language and the Brain.
This has potential to become a benchmark for comparison with other languages, and also useful for comparison with children who are just learning to read, Russian Sign Language speakers, bilinguals, the elderly, and patients with aphasia (a speech disorder caused by stroke or head trauma), she said.
Eye-tracking information has significant potential. By knowing how a healthy individual reads, a system can be created to analyze and help dyslexic people to recover discourse after head damage. Another territory where this could be useful is in deciding one's familiarity and fluency with Russian by watching eye movement while reading.
However, one information which was not to be seen in the press release is if the research had anything to do with the advertising industry since such sensitive information could be sold to corporations, which in turn could utilise the data for serving more specific and interest-oriented ads.
The research was published and distributed in the journal Behavior Research Methods.
