An eye tracking study of digital text reading: a comparison between poor and typical readers

Reading and Writing - The inclusion of technology in schools, coupled with the importance of promoting reading for students with difficulties in particular, has increased the need for investigating...     

The role of two reading strategies in text comprehension: An eye fixation study in primary school children

This study examined whether 10–12‐year‐old children use two reading strategies to aid their text comprehension: (1) distinguishing between important and unimportant words; and (2) resolving anaphoric references. Of interest was the question to what extent use of these reading strategies was predictive of reading comprehension skill over and above decoding skill and vocabulary. Reading strategy use was examined by the recording of eye fixations on specific target words. In contrast to less successful comprehenders, more successful comprehenders invested more processing time in important than in unimportant words. On the other hand, they needed less time to determine the antecedent of an anaphor. The results suggest that more successful comprehenders build a more effective mental model of the text than less successful comprehenders in at least two ways. First, they allocate more attention to the incorporation of goal‐relevant than goal‐irrelevant information into the model. Second, they ascertain that the text model is coherent and richly connected.     

Third-grader's think-aloud protocols: Types of reading activities in reading an expository text

In the present study, we examined the reading activities of young readers, while reading an expository text. A total of 24 third-graders was administered a think-aloud task on two occasions. Their protocols were analysed by a coding system that captured two levels of the reading process: the word identification level and the reading comprehension level. Three indices reflecting three different types of reading activities were discerned: reading errors, reproduction, and activities referring to reading strategies. Correlational analyses showed the reading strategy index to be related to reading comprehension as measured by standardized tests. The think-aloud task constitutes a valuable instrument for examining strategic reading among young readers.     

Age differences in online processing of video: an eye movement study

Eye movements were recorded while sixty-two 1-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and adults watched television. Of interest was the extent to which viewers looked at the same place at the same time as their peers because high similarity across viewers suggests systematic viewing driven by comprehension processes. Similarity of gaze location increased with age. This was particularly true immediately following a cut to a new scene, partly because older viewers (but not infants) tended to fixate the center of the screen following a cut. Conversely, infants appear to require several seconds to orient to a new scene. Results are interpreted in the context of developing attention skills. Findings have implications for the extent to which infants comprehend and learn from commercial video.     

英语文本阅读中推理发生的认知研究

在英文阅读推理过程中前提决定结论,本文探讨影响前提确定的相关因素。     

Qualitative descriptions of error recovery patterns across reading level and sentence type: an eye movement analysis.

Purposes of the present study included describing a variety of error recovery patterns based on eye movement (EM) measures of sentence parsing across reading level and error type. A qualitative pattern analysis of EM mappings was completed for students with reading disabilities (n = 10) and nondisabled students (n = 10) who were parsing control and erred sentences. Independent variables included error type (syntactically ambiguous, semantically anomalous, and control sentences) and reading proficiency level. Dependent variables consisted of seven eye movement measures. Chi-square analyses were performed to examine group differences across frequencies per pattern. Results suggest that the error recovery strategies deployed by both groups were similar in pattern and frequency; patterns were largely organized, strategic, and efficient, as predicted. Evidence for seven newly defined strategies was found, with indications of multiple strategies within sentences by both groups. Strategies tended to be error "reanalysis" (vs. "recovery") heuristics, in that readers from both groups used regressions to reanalyze regions of inconsistency rather than regions of disambiguation. Earlier conclusions regarding disorganized processing and individual differences among adolescents with reading disabilities are discussed.     

Reading training by means of disappearing text: effects on reading performance and eye movements

The Reading Acceleration Program (RAP), which uses adaptively increasing text erasure rates to enforce reading rate improvements, has been positively evaluated in various languages, reader and age groups. The current study compared the established incremental increase of text erasure rate with a training using fixed erasure rates in two groups of young, non-impaired German adults. Eye-tracking measures prior and post training examined training-related changes of eye-movement patterns. Equal gains in reading performance in both training groups led to the conclusion that not the adaptive increase but already text erasure at fixed rates provides an economically efficient tool for the enhancement of reading rates. Furthermore, eye-tracking results suggest that text erasure training affects word processing not only at one specific level, but simultaneously at pre-lexical, lexical, and post-lexical stages. Although these outcomes are promising, further research is necessary to determine the optimal individual erasure rates that preserve good comprehension at varying levels of text difficulty and in different orthographies.     

朗读条件下词切分方式对说明文阅读影响的眼动研究

在以采用默读方式研究词切分对阅读绩效影响研究的基础上,就朗读务件下词切分对说明文阅读绩效的影响进行了研究.实验一采用单因素4水平(呈现方式:无空格,词间空格,非词空格,字间空格)重复测量实验设计;实验二采用灰色突出显示词边界,确保四种呈现方式下材料的长度相同进行进一步探讨.结果发现:(1)在汉语语篇中插入词间空格会促进朗读;(2)在汉语语篇中插入非词间空格和字间空格会阻碍朗读.     

Syntactic boundaries and comma placement during silent reading of Chinese text: evidence from eye movements

In an eye‐tracking experiment, we investigated whether and how a comma influences the reading of Chinese sentences comprised of different types of syntactic constituent such as word, phrase and clause. Participants read Chinese sentences that did or did not insert a comma at the end of a syntactic constituent. The results showed that the fixation times were shorter for the target word followed by a comma than for that followed by no comma, which suggests that a comma facilitated word identification during the reading of Chinese sentences. Furthermore, the insertion of commas shortened the total fixation times in the post‐target region only for the clause condition. The data are consistent with previous findings concerning the role of segmentation cues in reading, and compatible with the implicit prosody hypothesis.     

Eye movement behaviour during reading of Japanese sentences: Effects of word length and visual complexity

Two experiments are presented that examine how the visual characteristics of Japanese words influence eye movement behaviour during reading. In Experiment 1, reading behaviour was compared for words comprising either one or two kanji characters. The one-character words were significantly less likely to be fixated on first-pass, and had significantly longer overall reading times, than the two-character words. In Experiment 2, reading behaviour was compared for two-kanji character words, for which the first character was either visually simple or visually complex (determined by the number of strokes). Visual complexity significantly influenced total word reading times and the probability of the individual visually simple/complex characters being fixated on first pass. Additional analyses showed no preferred viewing position for two-kanji character words. Overall, the study provides experimental evidence of an influence of specific visual characteristics of Japanese words on eye movement behaviour during reading, as shown by both fixation probabilities and reading times. The findings must be explained by processing at (or beyond) a visual level impacting on eye movement behavior during reading of Japanese text.     

The effects of instruction on situation model construction: an eye fixation study on text comprehension in primary school children

This study examined whether the formation of a situation model can be encouraged by a situation‐focused instruction in primary school children. To achieve this, the standard reading‐for‐comprehension instruction was adapted so that it would emphasise the importance of imagination in narrative text comprehension. The results showed that the situational instruction enhanced the situation model construction abilities in good comprehenders in such a way that it improved not only their memory for the situation model but also the ease with which they filled in the gaps in time and space that appeared in the narratives. In poor comprehenders, the situational instruction led to a redistribution of attentional resources allocated to textbase‐ and situation‐level processing. It was suggested that this caused them to go beyond encoding the explicit text and instead construct a situation model from it, and that they did so without enriching the model with general‐knowledge inferences as much as good comprehenders.     

Pre‐schoolers,print and storybooks: an observational study using eye movement analysis

This study used eye‐gaze analysis to determine the extent to which pre‐school children visually attended to print when looking at two storybooks, to contrast visual attention to print for a print‐salient versus a picture‐salient storybook, and to study individual differences in pre‐schoolers' visual preferences. Results indicated that pre‐school children infrequently attended to print: in a traditional picture‐salient storybook, 2.7% of their fixations focused on print and 2.5% of their time was spent looking in regions of print. The children fixated more frequently on print and spent more time looking in print regions when reading a print‐salient storybook, within which 7% of fixations focused on print and 6% of time was spent in print zones. Effect size estimates showed this difference to be consistent with a very large effect. Little variation in visual attention to print was observed across the ten children, and children's alphabet knowledge was not associated with the variance in children's visual attention to print. Educational implications are discussed.     

Exploring how relevance instructions affect personal reading intentions,reading goals and text processing: A mixed methods study

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to investigate how relevance instructions influence readers’ personal reading intentions, reading goals, text processing, and memory for text. Undergraduates (n = 52) were randomly assigned to one of three pre-reading relevance instruction conditions that asked them to read from a perspective or to read for understanding. Experimental results showed that information was read slower and remembered better when it was relevant. However, some readers spent more time reading irrelevant information, whereas others spent less time reading this information. Post-reading interviews were analyzed to explain these reading time differences. The interview data indicated that relevance instructions influenced readers’ goals and the strategies they used to meet those goals. The data sets were complementary: the quantitative data indicated differences in reading time and recall, and the qualitative data allowed us to explain why these differences occurred. These data revealed three distinct reader profiles within and across conditions, and demonstrate how relevance instructions affect reader goals, processing, and comprehension.     

Eye-movement modeling of integrative reading of an illustrated text: Effects on processing and learning

Integrative processing of verbal and graphical information is crucial when students read an illustrated text to learn from it. This study examines the potential of a novel approach to support the processing of text and graphics. We used eye movement modeling example (EMME) in the school context to model students' integrative processes of verbal and pictorial information by replaying a model's gazes while reading an illustrated text on a topic different from that of the learning episode. Forty-two 7th graders were randomly assigned to an experimental (EMME) or a control condition (No-EMME) and were asked to read an illustrated science text about the food chain. Online measures of text processing and offline measures of reading outcomes were used. Eye-movement indices indicated that students in the EMME condition showed more integrative processing than students in the No-EMME condition. They also performed better than the latter in the verbal and graphical recall, and in the transfer task. Finally, the relationship between the duration of reprocessing the graphical segments while rereading the correspondent verbal segments and transfer performance was stronger in the EMME condition, after controlling for the individual differences of prior knowledge, reading comprehension, and achievement in science. Overall, the findings suggest the potential of eye-tracking methodology as an instruction tool.     

The role of phonology in reading Japanese: Or why I don't hear myself when reading Japanese

Based on the phenomenal experience that when I read Japanese I don't hear inner speech, I suggest that the role of phonology may be more limited when reading text in Japanese than in English. Although this possibility has been suggested by others, I argue for somewhat different sources of this reduced role. Specifically, I propose that the greater visual discriminability of kanji words under degraded conditions, and the less important role of word order as a syntactic cue are likely to be the key factors. Relevant literature is reviewed, and directions for future research are suggested.     

Visual behavior and self-efficacy of game playing: an eye movement analysis

ABSTRACT

This study was to investigate the role of students’ game self-efficacy in their game performance as well as in their visual behavior distributions and transfer patterns during their gameplay. A total of 48 university students were recruited for participating in a gameplaying task while wearing with an ASL Mobile Eye eye-tracker. After the gameplay, each participant was asked to report their self-efficacy of the gameplay. Based on the self-reported game self-efficacy (GSE) score, the participants were divided into the higher and lower GSE groups. Independent t tests were used to compare their game performances and eye-tracking indices for each area of interest. A lag sequential analysis was used to profile the visual transfer pattern for each group. The results showed that the higher GSE group had better performances than the lower GSE group. During the gameplay, the higher GSE students tended to pay more attention to the critical information for a successful play. In addition, the lag sequential analyses revealed different visual transfer patterns for the two GSE groups. The higher GSE group tended to show a critical-factor-centralized visual-trasfer pattern which demonstrated more planning and monitoring gameplaying strategies; while the lower GSE students, probably lacking the self-confidence of gameplaying, tended to pay more attention to the remaining time for the game.This study may provide suggestions for future game-based leraning system designs.     

The link between text difficulty,reading speed and exploration of printed text during shared book reading

In the current study the reading speed of the narration and the difficulty of the text was manipulated and links were explored with children’s attention to the printed text in shared book reading. Thirty-nine children (24 grade 1 and 15 grade 2) were presented easy and difficult books at slow (syllable by syllable) or fast (adult reading speed) pace while their eye movements were monitored. Results revealed an interaction between speed and difficulty. For the easy and difficult books, children spent more time and made more fixations on the printed text when it was presented at slow speed than at fast speed. However, at fast speed, children spend more time and made more fixations on the text of the easy rather than the difficult books, but at slow speed no difference was observed. In addition, at slow speed positive correlations were observed between attention to print and letter knowledge and word reading skills. Results provide important information for the practice of shared book reading suggesting that to increase attention to print, speed should be reduced. Future research should investigate the role of reading speed on reading related outcomes such as discourse comprehension and children’s interest in reading activities.     

Gender differences in reading: Examining text-based interest in relation to text characteristics and reading comprehension

Reading is a key competence for knowledge acquisition and learning processes. One important source of reading motivation is interest. Even though students' text-based interest often differs by gender, it remains unclear which text factors underlie these differences and whether text-based interest relates to reading comprehension among boys and girls. In a sample of 514 elementary students (47.2% girls), this study examined whether text topic, protagonists' gender, and text difficulty affect boys' and girls' text-based interest and whether interest and reading comprehension are intertwined. Based on a repeated within-subject design using fourteen narrative texts, the results indicated that boys' interest was higher in texts with male-attributed topics, male protagonists, and in more difficult texts. In contrast, girls’ interest was only affected by text difficulty. Text-based interest and reading comprehension were significantly related, albeit stronger for boys than for girls. The findings are discussed regarding future implications for research and educational practice.     

The child,the text and the teacher: reading primers and reading instruction

From the late sixteenth century, in response to the problem of how best to teach children to read, a variety of texts, such as primers, spellers and readers were produced in England for vernacular instruction. This paper describes how these materials were used by teachers to develop, first, a specific religious understanding according to the stricture of the time and, second, a moral reading practice that provided the child with a guide to secular conduct. The analysis focuses on the use of these texts as a productive means for shaping the child-reader in the context of newly emerging educational spaces, which fostered a particular, morally formative relation among teacher, child and text.     

The influence of decodability in early reading text on reading achievement: a review of the evidence

The purpose of this review is to synthesize the existing research on decodability as a text characteristic examining how reading decodable text impacts students?? reading performance and growth. The results are organized into two sections based on the research designs of the studies: (1) studies that described student performance when reading texts of varying decodability levels, and (2) studies that compared the reading performance of students after participation in a treatment that manipulated decodable text as an independent variable. Collectively the results indicate that decodability is a critical characteristic of early reading text as it increases the likelihood that students will use a decoding strategy and results in immediate benefits, particularly with regard to accuracy. The studies point to the need for multiple-criteria text with decodability being one key characteristic in ensuring that students develop the alphabetic principle that is necessary for successful reading, rather than text developed based on the single criterion of decodability.