Eye-voice and finger-voice spans in adults’ oral reading of connected texts*

Abstract

Abstract The present paper investigates the interaction between eye movements, voice articulation and the movements of the index finger dynamically pointing to a text line in oral finger-point reading of Italian. During finger-point reading, the finger appears to be ahead of the voice most of the times, by a margin that is significantly modulated by the distribution of phrasal and prosodic units in the reading text. Eye movements replicate the same effects on a different time scale. The eye is ahead of both voice and finger by a wide margin (confirming evidence observed for English and German sentence reading), while showing a tendency to re-synchronise with voice articulation at the right edge of strong prosodic units (sentence boundaries). Our evidence suggests a multicomponent view of the time span between the eye/finger and the voice. The span is shown to be the dynamic outcome of an optimally adaptive reading strategy, resulting from the interaction between individual decoding skills, the reader’s phonological buffer capacity, and the structural complexity of a reading text. Proficient readers modulate their span to compensate for the different timing between word fixation and word articulation, read faster, and dynamically adjust their processing window to the meaningful, prosodic units of a text.