McDonald Scott A, Shillcock Richard C
Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ Scotland, UK.
Vision Res. 2003 Jul;43(16):1735-51. doi: 10.1016/s0042-6989(03)00237-2.
We report the results of an investigation into the ability of transitional probability (word-to-word contingency statistics) to account for reading behaviour. Using a corpus of eye movements recorded during the reading of newspaper text, we demonstrate both the forward [P(n/n-1)] and backward [P(n/n+1)] transitional probability measures to be predictive of first fixation and gaze durations: the higher the transitional probability, the shorter the fixation time. Initial fixation position was also affected by the forward measure; we observed a small rightward shift for words that were highly predictable from the preceding word. Although transitional probability is sensitive to word class, with function words being generally more predictable from their context than content words, the measures accounted equally well for the data for both classes.
我们报告了一项关于转移概率（词与词的相依统计）解释阅读行为能力的调查结果。通过使用在阅读报纸文本过程中记录的眼动语料库，我们证明了前向转移概率[P(n/n - 1)]和后向转移概率[P(n/n + 1)]测量值均可预测首次注视时长和凝视时长：转移概率越高，注视时间越短。初始注视位置也受到前向测量值的影响；我们观察到，对于从前一个单词高度可预测的单词，会有一个小的向右偏移。尽管转移概率对词类敏感，功能词通常比实词在语境中更具可预测性，但这两种测量值对两类词的数据解释效果同样良好。
