ERIC Number: EJ1094289
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016-Mar
Pages: 15
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0364-0213
EISSN: N/A
Eye Movements Reveal the Influence of Event Structure on Reading Behavior
Swets, Benjamin; Kurby, Christopher A.
Cognitive Science, v40 n2 p466-480 Mar 2016
When we read narrative texts such as novels and newspaper articles, we segment information presented in such texts into discrete events, with distinct boundaries between those events. But do our eyes reflect this event structure while reading? This study examines whether eye movements during the reading of discourse reveal how readers respond online to event structure. Participants read narrative passages as we monitored their eye movements. Several measures revealed that event structure predicted eye movements. In two experiments, we found that both early and overall reading times were longer for event boundaries. We also found that regressive saccades were more likely to land on event boundaries, but that readers were less likely to regress out of an event boundary. Experiment 2 also demonstrated that tracking event structure carries a working memory load. Eye movements provide a rich set of online data to test the cognitive reality of event segmentation during reading.
Descriptors: Eye Movements, Reading Processes, Experiments, Reading Rate, Predictor Variables, Short Term Memory, Cognitive Structures
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A