Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

Cognitive Processes in Audience Decision Making 109

Lexical access of both written and spoken words also takes place in three regions of the brain’s left

hemisphere: the front and rear regions of the left temporal lobe, and the area at the junction of the

left temporal and parietal lobes.^32 Disorders associated with these three regions include primary

progressive aphasia and semantic dementia.

When perceiving written words, readers can recognize only those letters or words that appear

in a very small area of their retinas called the fovea , the area in which they have maximum visual

acuity. In fact, they can recognize only fi ve to six letters on either side of the letter upon which

their eyes focus or fi xate.^33 Readers cannot recognize words on lines either above or below the one

on which they are fi xating.^34 Readers’ ability to recognize printed letters and numbers depends

on their ability to perceive each letter’s or number’s distinct visual features. They will confuse two

letters only when the letters have many visual features in common, for example, C and G.^35 How-

ever, readers can recognize any letter more accurately if it is in the context of a word rather than

standing alone.^36

The amount of time readers spend fi xating on any word is very brief. The average fi xation time

per word is about 250 milliseconds, or one-quarter of a second.^37 The more letters in the word, the

more fi xations made on the word, and the longer the duration of the fi xations.^38 Readers fi xate on

each word an average of 30 additional milliseconds for each additional letter in it.^39

As one would expect, readers’ fi xation times on words are longer when the letters in the word

are hard to perceive.^40 Readers’ fi xation times are also longer if the word is unfamiliar to them.^41

They are longer on words that are not predictable from the preceding context.^42 In addition,

readers’ fi xation times are longer if the word is ambiguous or has multiple meanings.^43 Readers’

fi xation times on pronouns are longer the farther the pronoun is from its antecedent.^44 Fixation

times are also longer if the antecedent violates a gender stereotype, for example a truck driver

referred to as she.^45

Readers fi xate on most of the words in each sentence,^46 but take longer fi xating on the more

important words. For example, they may spend over 1,500 milliseconds on a content word that

introduces the topic of a new paragraph, but they will spend much less time on it when they

encounter that same word a second time. Moreover, readers tend to fi xate longer on the fi nal word

in both clauses and sentences.^47

A series of studies that tracked the eye movements of students reading 15 short expository pas-

sages from Newsweek and Time magazines fi nds that readers’ eyes focus directly on over 80% of the

content words but skip about 40% of the function words such as the and a.^48 When a passage is

diffi cult to comprehend, readers fi xate on a larger percentage of words in the passage. But when

words in the passage are highly predictable due to their context, readers are much more likely to

skip over them.^49

Readers’ fi xations account for more than 90% of the readers’ total reading time. Eye move-

ments in small jumps or saccades account for the other 10%. Most saccades take only about 25 to

45 milliseconds, during which time a reader’s vision is blurred. Readers who recognize that they

do not understand a sentence make regressive eye movements, or saccades to re-read previously

read words by returning to the point at which they began an incorrect syntactic analysis of the

sentence.^50 Readers of expository texts also re-read headings in order to more thoroughly integrate

text information with the topic signaled by the heading.^51 In addition, re-reading headings serves

to enhance recall.^52

Figure 3.6 displays one reader’s eye fi xations and saccades detected by an eye-tracking

device as she read an online newspaper.^53 Notice the reader made most fi xations, represented

as angles in the black lines, on headlines, photographs, and the fi rst sentences of news stories.

Such a pattern is typical of audiences skilled at getting their news from either online or print

newspapers.