Connected Text Reading and Differences in Text Reading Fluency in Adult Readers

Abstract

The process of connected text reading has received very little attention in contemporary cognitive psychology. This lack of attention is in parts due to a research tradition that emphasizes the role of basic lexical constituents, which can be studied in isolated words or sentences. However, this lack of attention is in parts also due to the lack of statistical analysis techniques, which accommodate interdependent time series. In this study, we investigate text reading performance with traditional and nonlinear analysis techniques and show how outcomes from multiple analyses can used to create a more detailed picture of the process of text reading. Specifically, we investigate reading performance of groups of literate adult readers that differ in reading fluency during a self-paced text reading task. Our results indicate that classical metrics of reading (such as word frequency) do not capture text reading very well, and that classical measures of reading fluency (such as average reading time) distinguish relatively poorly between participant groups. Nonlinear analyses of distribution tails and reading time fluctuations provide more fine-grained information about the reading process and reading fluency.

Environmental impacts of paper handouts vs. Online handouts-from a life cycle assessment prospective

“…• Wallot et al (2013), identified adult readers take an average of 5 minutes to read one page of information. However, based on the personal experience of the authors of this study, it has been determined that a total of 25 minutes is a more representative time in order to read and understand the information provided in 1 page.…”

“…Figure 10 presents the distribution of the air emissions being released the atmosphere most likely by the production process and user use. This phenomenon could be explained because computer production and use requires a great amount of energy [13].…”

“…However, its production not only involves the extraction of rare metals (lead, mercury, silver and gold) but is also more energy intense [13]. Furthermore, the manufacturing and user stages are responsible for high CO2 emissions [14].…”

Understanding reading as a form of language-use: A language game hypothesis

“…As we scale up once more from sentence to connected text reading, lexical features loose their constitutive role for the reading process all together (Wallot, Hollis, & van Rooij, 2013). Similarly, text coherence metrics that were developed to characterize text reading fail to yield many of their predicted effects on a reader's performance, if one observes reading of long connected text that spans more than a few paragraphs (McNerney, Goodwin, & Radvansky, 2011).…”

Recurrence Quantification Analysis of Processes and Products of Discourse: A Tutorial in R

“…This is due to the dynamic nature of the reading process, which exhibits quite complex dynamics: For example, reading of connected text leads to highly nonstationary reading times (Wallot, Hollis, & van Rooij, 2013), where a single word can have a significant impact on how reading performance changes over the next several hundred words (Booth, Brown, Eason, Wallot, & Kelty-Stephen, 2016) and where qualitative changes in reading performance occur (Wallot, O'Brien, Haussmann, Kloos, & Lyby, 2014), which are potentially indicative of qualitative shifts in the mental representations as a function of comprehension (Stephen, Dixon, & Isenhower, 2009). Moreover, the problem with naturalistic texts is that they are highly structured stimuli that cannot be experimentally manipulated, as one can do with random word lists in lexical decision and naming tasks, because the different psychologically relevant text descriptors are highly correlated among each other (Graf, Nagler, & Jacobs, 2005) and with the syntactical structure of a text (e.g., Keller, Carpenter, & Just, 2001) and their effects change across the time-course of reading (McNerney, Goodwin, & Radvansky, 2011;Teng, Wallot, & Kelty-Stephen, 2016;.…”