Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.