Graduate School of Informatics /Cognitive Sciences

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science Fatemeh Soleymani will defend his thesis.

Title: EYE MOVEMENT CONTROL IN PERSIAN READING: A CORPUS-ANALYTIC APPROACH

Date: 06th September 2018

Time: 09:30 AM

Place: A-108

Thesis Abstract :In the Latin script languages, specifically the English language, there exist studies on the eye movements’ pattern during reading. Thus, this study was conducted in order to investigate eye movement patterns in Persian. From these sentences, taken from the Bijankhan Persian Corpus, a number of eye movement measures were analyzed. The eye movement measures were first fixation landing position, first fixation duration, gaze duration, first run fixation count, regression in count, and regression out count. The word properties in this study were word length, word frequency, word predictability, word type (opacity and transparency), and phonemes. In order to control variances of random effects which were subject, sentence, and words, the linear mixed model were utilized in the analysis. The results show that word length has an effect on first fixation landing position. Furthermore, the preferred viewing location (PVL) analysis showed that first fixations landed close to the end of short words, close to the center of medium-long words and close to the beginning of long words. These results are in line with former studies. In the first fixation duration analysis it was found that medium-long words were fixated shorter than short words. Moreover, it was found that longer gaze durations (GD) and higher first run fixation count (FRFC) corresponded with longer words. Also, a relationship between regression in count (RIC) and phonemes was obtained.