New directions in theories of eye-movement control during reading

Several recent models of eye-movement control during reading have relaxed or abandoned assumptions about direct cognitive control of saccades and/or sequential attention to, and processing of, individual words. This chapter briefly describes these models and explores the implications of such changes for the field. It presents the Competition/Interaction, or C/I, model, illustrating how its perspective changes the issues of interest, interpretation of data and even vocabulary for discussing eye movements in reading. Adopting an assumption of parallel processing of words, rather than sequential processing, in particular, undercuts the assumption that eye fixation times and gaze durations can be used as measures of processing time for individual words. It also leads to a new perspective on the meanings of eye-movement events such as refixations, word skipping and moving to the next word, in general reducing their significance.