Professor Denis Drieghe | Inaugural Lecture Series | University of Southampton скачать в хорошем качестве

Professor Denis Drieghe | Inaugural Lecture Series | University of Southampton

This was the first Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences Inaugural Lecture in our 2025-26 series that celebrates the careers of our new Professors. On 26th November 2025, Professor Denis Drieghe from the School of Psychology presented a lecture to highlight their research, real-world impact and future research directions. Eye Movements during Reading as a Window on Language Processing Eye-tracking is widely acknowledged as the methodological gold standard for examining the cognitive mechanisms underlying reading. A substantial body of research has demonstrated that a variety of linguistic factors systematically modulate both the duration and spatial distribution of eye movements. For example, high-frequency words (e.g., apple), which are processed with relative ease, are typically associated with shorter fixation durations and fewer fixations compared to low-frequency words (e.g., inlet). In a typical experiment, participants read silently from a computer screen while an eye-tracker records their eye positions with high temporal and spatial precision, thereby enabling the detailed analysis of moment-to-moment processing during reading. Crucially, because this technique does not interfere with the natural behaviour of participants, it offers a high degree of ecological validity. The field of eye-movement research in reading has, arguably, been overly concentrated on a single, highly controlled task: the careful reading of an isolated, self-contained sentence by native speakers, predominantly in English. In his inaugural lecture, Professor Denis Drieghe addresses how this narrow empirical focus has resulted in an unduly restricted theoretical perspective on reading. He does so by examining reading across a broader range of contexts, including different tasks (e.g., skim reading), extended formats (e.g., paragraphs), participants with varying levels of reading proficiency, in languages with markedly different orthographic systems (e.g., Chinese), and by readers who are non-native speakers.