FELS Inaugural Lecture with Professor Denis Drieghe Event

Time:

3:30pm

Date:

2025-11-26 15:30:00

Venue:

University of Southampton, Centenary Building (100), University Road, Southampton, SO17 1BJ

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Event details

This is our first Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences Inaugural Lecture in our 2025-26 series that celebrates the careers of our newly appointed Professors. At our first event on Wednesday 26th November 2025, Professor Denis Drieghe from the School of Psychology and Professor Maggie Donovan-Hall from the School of Health Sciences will present their research.

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Watch all the lecture videos from the 2025-26 series here.

Professor Denis Drieghe

Eye Movements during Reading as a Window on Language Processing

Eye-tracking is widely acknowledged as the methodological gold standard for examining the cognitive mechanisms underlying reading. A substantial body of research has demonstrated that a variety of linguistic factors systematically modulate both the duration and spatial distribution of eye movements. For example, high-frequency words (e.g., apple), which are processed with relative ease, are typically associated with shorter fixation durations and fewer fixations compared to low-frequency words (e.g., inlet). In a typical experiment, participants read silently from a computer screen while an eye-tracker records their eye positions with high temporal and spatial precision, thereby enabling the detailed analysis of moment-to-moment processing during reading. Crucially, because this technique does not interfere with the natural behaviour of participants, it offers a high degree of ecological validity.

The field of eye-movement research in reading has, arguably, been overly concentrated on a single, highly controlled task: the careful reading of an isolated, self-contained sentence by native speakers, predominantly in English. In his inaugural lecture, Professor Denis Drieghe will address how this narrow empirical focus has resulted in an unduly restricted theoretical perspective on reading. He will do so by examining reading across a broader range of contexts, including different tasks (e.g., skim reading), extended formats (e.g., paragraphs), participants with varying levels of reading proficiency, in languages with markedly different orthographic systems (e.g., Chinese), and by readers who are non-native speakers.

Biography

Professor Denis Drieghe obtained his PhD in Experimental Psychology from Ghent University, Belgium, where he subsequently held consecutive positions as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow funded by the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders. During this period, he was awarded several travel grants, which enabled him to spend a total of 2.5 years collaborating with Professors Keith Rayner and Sandy Pollatsek at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (USA). He later joined the University of Southampton as a Visiting Research Fellow, working with Professor Simon Liversedge, before being appointed Lecturer in the Department of Psychology in 2010. He is now Professor of Experimental Psychology in the School of Psychology, where he also serves as Deputy Head of the School (Research).

Professor Drieghe’s research lies in the field of eye movements during reading. His early work concentrated on parafoveal processing, before broadening to investigate task effects in reading (e.g., reading for comprehension versus skim reading) and individual differences in reading ability (e.g., spelling skills and reading proficiency). Over the course of his career, his research has examined reading across multiple languages—including English, Dutch, Finnish, Chinese, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, and Hindi—and has involved direct cross-linguistic comparisons, both between native speakers and within bilingual populations.