Effects of BGM on eye movements
involuntary oculomotor behaviors
REGRESSION
Reading with or without BGM overall demonstrated quite similar patterns in first pass measures which were related to lexical access and world-level processing (Table Compared to the Silence group, reading with BGM involved a larger fixation count, a larger regression count, longer fixation durations, and fewer word skipping behaviors (Table Moreover, we found that learners in the BGM condition skipped fewer words than those in silence condition, which differs from a previous study by Zhang et al.Last but not least, there were no between-group differences in change of pupil size and blink rate. These involuntary oculomotor behaviors are related to not only cognitive load, but also arousal, stress and fatigueOverall, even though results indicated that BGM had little influence on passage comprehension accuracy, eye movement measures revealed that students in the BGM group might have experienced heavier cognitive load in post-lexical semantic integration than those in the Silence group. Considered as a whole, the present results, at least partially, supported the assumption regarding extraneous cognitive load in Cognitive Load TheoryOn the other hand, evidence from eye-tracking furthers our understanding on how BGM may affect the reading process: It influences post-lexical integration (i.e., more controlled processing at the semantic and global level) rather than lexical access (i.e., involuntary, and more automatic processing at the word level)