Abstract

We investigate the effect of dependency distance and its directionality on eye-tracking measures in Brazilian Portuguese. Using the RastrOS corpus enriched with surprisal and syntactic annotations, we find that absolute dependency distance significantly improves the prediction of first fixation durations, supporting memory-based accounts of sentence processing. In contrast, the direction of the dependency (whether the dependent precedes or follows the head) shows weaker and less consistent effects. These results indicate that early lexical retrieval is sensitive to distance magnitude, while later reading measures reflecting integration are less affected, highlighting the complementary role of syntactic distance alongside surprisal in modelling reading behaviour.