Why do readers typically fixate near the center of a word, with a bias towards word onset? Alhama, Siegelman, Frost, & Armstrong (2019) proposed an account based on (1) perceptual constraints that reduce the likelihood of perceiving a letter the further it is from the fixated location, and (2) the information available from the perceived letters for identifying the word. We expand this work to predict the fixation location distributions of 7-letter words for 43 languages from 9 language families. We found that in the majority of the languages, words were most likely to be correctly recognized when fixating near the center, slightly toward onset. However, there were deviations from this trend, such as predicting more accurate recognition when fixating slightly towards offset in Slavic languages. Our results provide novel predictions for experimental work that considers a flexible language system that optimizes initial fixations based on information theory constraints.

Proficient readers typically fixate near the center of a word,with a slight bias towards word onset. We explore a novelaccount of this phenomenon based on combining information-theory with perceptual constraints in a connectionist model ofvisual word recognition. This account posits that the amountof information-content available for word identification variesacross fixation locations and across languages. These differ-ences contribute to the overall fixation location bias in differ-ent languages, make the novel prediction that certain wordsare more readily identified when fixating at an atypical fixa-tion location, and predict specific cross-linguistic differences.We tested these predictions across several simulations in En-glish and Hebrew, and in a behavioral experiment. The resultsconfirmed that the bias to fixate closer to word onset alignswith reducing uncertainty in the visual signal, that some wordsare more readily identified at atypical fixation locations, andthat these effects vary across languages.

We propose and test a theoretical perspective in which a universal hallmark of successful literacy acquisition is the convergence of the speech and orthographic processing systems onto a common network of neural structures, regardless of how spoken words are represented orthographically in a writing system. During functional MRI, skilled adult readers of four distinct and highly contrasting languages, Spanish, English, Hebrew, and Chinese, performed an identical semantic categorization task to spoken and written words. Results from three complementary analytic approaches demonstrate limited language variation, with speech-print convergence emerging as a common brain signature of reading proficiency across the wide spectrum of selected languages, whether their writing system is alphabetic or logographic, whether it is opaque or transparent, and regardless of the phonological and morphological structure it represents.