Eye movement can help gauge English proficiency

MIT scientists have uncovered a new way of telling how well people are learning English: tracking their eyes.

Researchers used data generated by cameras trained on readers' eyes.

They found that patterns of eye movement - particularly how long people's eyes rest on certain words - correlate strongly with performance on standardised tests of English as a second language.

"To a large extent (eye movement) captures linguistic proficiency, as we can measure it against benchmarks of standardised tests," said Yevgeni Berzak, a postdoc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US.

"The signal of eye movement during reading is very rich and very informative," said Berzak.

The researchers suggest the new method has potential use as a testing tool.

"It has real potential applications," said Roger Levy, an associate professor at MIT.

The researchers used a dataset of eye movement records from work conducted by Berzak.

The dataset has 145 students of English as a second language, divided almost evenly among four native languages - Chinese, Japanese, Portugese, and Spanish - as well as 37 native English speakers.

The readers were given 156 sentences to read, half of which were part of a "fixed test" in which everyone in the study read the same sentences.

The video footage enabled the researchers to focus intensively on a series of duration times - the length of time readers were fixated on particular words.

The team called the set of metrics they used the "EyeScore."