Eye movements on the detection of errors in texts: reading and revision

Abstract

This paper reports a research on the relation between the reading and the text revision, specially the detection of errors, one subprocess of the text revision. One experiment with detection of errors was done by professional revisers and by subjects that don’t work with revision, using an eye tracker. Initially, it was analyzed the proficiency in the realization of the experiment. After, the patterns of fixations in the detection of the errors were related with the proficiency in text revision and with the types of errors. To the detection of the surface errors, the subjects read the texts with a slower rhythm, with generally larger fixations. To the detection of more global errors, there was the increase of the number of fixations, in other words the texts were read with a rhythm not so slow, but repeatedly.