An eye movement analysis of topic-shift effect during repeated reading.

This study replicated previous reading time studies that have observed increased reading times for sentences introducing a new subtopic in a text, compared with sentences that are continuations of a subtopic. This topic-shift effect was obtained for the initial reading but not when the same text was reread. The absence of topic-shift effect was taken to suggest that readers construct a mental representation of the text's topic structure during the initial reading. The topic-shift effect was primarily due to regressive fixations, which tended to land in the first half of sentences. Regressions were typically launched at the end of sentences, with topic-shift sentences also well before the sentence end was reached. These findings are interpreted as evidence for the integrative nature of regressive fixations.