Orthographic Complexity Moderates Eye Movements While Reading in Hindi, Along with Length & Frequency

Past research on eye-movements during reading and comprehension has primarily focused on alphabetic scripts, such as the Roman script used to write European languages like English, Dutch, German, and Spanish, where classical measures like word length can be easily calculated by counting characters. However, this approach may not generalize to alphasyllabic languages like Hindi and other Indian languages written using the Devanagari script, where many characters depend on diacritic markers for proper pronunciation. This poses challenges in studying these languages in eye-tracking research, discourages eye-tracking studies with these languages. To address this gap, we asked 61 native Hindi speakers (L1) read Hindi text, while their eye-movements were being tracked. Results revealed that a complexity metric for the script predicts variables such as first fixation duration, gaze duration, single fixation duration, total reading time, and number of fixations. These results were also correlated with variables such as word frequency (van Heuven et al., 2014) for all eye-tracking measures.