400 Sprache, Linguistik
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Studying the role of expertise in poetry reading, we hypothesized that poets’ expert knowledge comprises genre-appropriate reading- and comprehension strategies that are reflected in distinct patterns of reading behavior.
We recorded eye movements while two groups of native speakers (n=10 each) read selected Russian poetry: an expert group of professional poets who read poetry daily, and a control group of novices who read poetry less than once a month. We conducted mixed-effects regression analyses to test for effects of group on first-fixation durations, first-pass gaze durations, and total reading times per word while controlling for lexical- and text variables.
First-fixation durations exclusively reflected lexical features, and total reading times reflected both lexical- and text variables; only first-pass gaze durations were additionally modulated by readers’ level of expertise. Whereas gaze durations of novice readers became faster as they progressed through the poems, and differed between line-final words and non-final ones, poets retained a steady pace of first-pass reading throughout the poems and within verse lines. Additionally, poets’ gaze durations were less sensitive to word length.
We conclude that readers’ level of expertise modulates the way they read poetry. Our findings support theories of literary comprehension that assume distinct processing modes which emerge from prior experience with literary texts.
We examined genre-specific reading strategies for literary texts and hypothesized that text categorization (literary prose vs. poetry) modulates both how readers gather information from a text (eye movements) and how they realize its phonetic surface form (speech production). We recorded eye movements and speech while college students (N = 32) orally read identical texts that we categorized and formatted as either literary prose or poetry. We further varied the text position of critical regions (text-initial vs. text-medial) to compare how identical information is read and articulated with and without context; this allowed us to assess whether genre-specific reading strategies make differential use of identical context information. We observed genre-dependent differences in reading and speaking tempo that reflected several aspects of reading and articulation. Analyses of regions of interests revealed that word-skipping increased particularly while readers progressed through the texts in the prose condition; speech rhythm was more pronounced in the poetry condition irrespective of the text position. Our results characterize strategic poetry and prose reading, indicate that adjustments of reading behavior partly reflect differences in phonetic surface form, and shed light onto the dynamics of genre-specific literary reading. They generally support a theory of literary comprehension that assumes distinct literary processing modes and incorporates text categorization as an initial processing step.
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.
Wer den Versuch unternimmt, sich einen Überblick über den „Sprachgebrauch im Wandel der öffentlichen Medien" zu verschaffen, der wird bald resignieren; zu lückenhaft sind die Forschungsergebnisse, die uns bislang vorliegen. Dennoch unternehmen wir den Versuch, eine Entwicklungslinie zu skizzieren, die von den Anfangen des Printmediums 'Zeitung' bis hin zur 'elektronischen Zeitung' reicht. Diese ist umrissen mit dem Schlagwort „Von der Ganzlektüre zur selektiven Lektüre". Im Laufe der Zeit nimmt die Notwendigkeit immer mehr zu, die Zeitung so aufzuarbeiten, daß die Lesenden sich ihre Lektüre leicht und schnell auswählen können. Diese Entwicklung hat gravierende Auswirkungen auf die Organisation der Zeitung als Ganzes wie den Bau der Texte. Was für das Printmedium charakteristisch ist, setzt sich in seiner Online-Version - wenn auch unter veränderten Vorzeichen – verstärkt fort. Hauptgrund dafür ist die Hypertext-Organisation der elektronischen Zeitung. Exemplifiziert wird dieser Entwicklungsprozeß an ausgewählten Beispielen, wobei auch ein Blick auf Medienkonkurrenten und deren Einfluß geworfen wird. Obwohl Analysen dieser Art die Einbeziehung der politisch-sozialen, ökonomischen und technisch-medialen Bedingungen verlangt, unter denen Medienkommunikation abläuft, werden solche Gesichtspunkte nur am Rande explizit angesprochen. Einen zentralen Punkt bildet für uns außerdem die These, daß eine angemessene linguistische Beschäftigung mit Medien nicht bei der Produktanalyse, d. h. bei dem Medientext und seinen Eigenschaften stehen bleiben darf, sondern um den Blick auf die Produktion und Rezeption zu ergänzen ist.