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In recent years, reading has become an increasingly digital experience. In addition to various subjective impressions about the quality of reading from digital media, e.g. that it is more effortful than reading conventional books, a number of more scientific questions arise at the interface of reading research and book studies. Here, we summarize several new insights on reading effort and reading behavior on digital media. Part one reviews a study in which young and elderly adults read short texts on three different reading devices: a paper page, an e-reader and a tablet computer and answered comprehension questions about them while their eye movements and EEG were recorded. Older adults showed faster mean fixation durations and lower EEG theta band voltage density – known to covary with memory encoding and retrieval – when reading from a tablet computer in comparison to the other devices. Young adults showed comparable fixation durations and theta activity for all three devices. These results can be explained by better text discriminability (higher contrast) of the tablet computer. Older readers may benefit from this enhanced contrast because contrast sensitivity decreases with age. In the second part, we present an explorative study about the influence of font type and typographic alignment (flush left vs. justified) on reading from a tablet computer. Importantly, the eyes do not fall between – increasingly larger – spaces, as expected, but – to the contrary – use these spaces for planning an optimal fixation of the next word. In summary, the perspective presented here provides initial evidence about the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary research between experimental reading, neurocognition and book studies.
In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the relationship between the subject preference in the resolution of subject-object ambiguities in German embedded clauses and semantic word order constraints (i.e., prominence hierarchies relating to the specificity/referentiality of noun phrases, case assignment and thematic role assignment). Our central research question concerned the timecourse with which prominence information is used and particularly whether it modulates the subject preference. In both experiments, we replicated previous findings of reanalysis effects for object-initial structures. Our findings further suggest that noun phrase prominence does not alter initial parsing strategies (viz., the subject preference), but rather modulates the ease of later reanalysis processes. In Experiment 1, the object case assigned by the verb did not affect the ease of reanalysis. However, the syntactic reanalysis was rendered more difficult when the order of the two arguments violated the specificity/referentiality hierarchy. Experiment 2 revealed that the initial subject preference also holds for verbs favoring an object-initial base order (i.e., dative object-experiencer verbs). However, the advantage for subject-initial sentences is neutralized in relatively late processing stages when the thematic role hierarchy and the specificity hierarchy converge to promote scrambling.