Using Simulations to Understand the Reading of Rapidly Displayed Subtitles

Liao et al. (2020) reported an eye-movement experiment in which subtitles were displayed at three different rates, with a key finding being that, with increasing speeds, participants made fewer, shorter fixations and longer saccades. To understand why these eye-movement behaviors might be adaptive, we completed simulations using the E-Z Reader model (Reichle et al., 2012) to examine how subtitle speed might affect word identification and sentence comprehension, as well as the efficacy of six possible compensatory reading strategies. These simulations suggest that the imposition of a lexical-processing deadline and/or strategy of skipping short words may support reading comprehension in impoverished conditions.