Switching between reading tasks leads to phase-transitions in reading times in L1 and L2 readers

Abstract

Reading research uses different tasks to investigate different levels of the reading process, such as word recognition, syntactic parsing, or semantic integration. It seems to be tacitly assumed that the underlying cognitive process that constitute reading are stable across those tasks. However, nothing is known about what happens when readers switch from one reading task to another. The stability assumptions of the reading process suggest that the cognitive system resolves this switching between two tasks quickly. Here, we present an alternative language-game hypothesis (LGH) of reading that begins by treating reading as a softly-assembled process and that assumes, instead of stability, context-sensitive flexibility of the reading process. LGH predicts that switching between two reading tasks leads to longer lasting phase-transition like patterns in the reading process. Using the nonlinear-dynamical tool of recurrence quantification analysis, we test these predictions by examining series of individual word reading times in self-paced reading tasks where native (L1) and second language readers (L2) transition between random word and ordered text reading tasks. We find consistent evidence for phase-transitions in the reading times when readers switch from ordered text to random-word reading, but we find mixed evidence when readers transition from random-word to ordered-text reading. In the latter case, L2 readers show moderately stronger signs for phase-transitions compared to L1 readers, suggesting that familiarity with a language influences whether and how such transitions occur. The results provide evidence for LGH and suggest that the cognitive processes underlying reading are not fully stable across tasks but exhibit soft-assembly in the interaction between task and reader characteristics.

Using measures of reading time regularity (RTR) to quantify eye movement dynamics, and how they are shaped by linguistic information

“…Finally, RTR was formulated for the application to reading tasks ( Wallot 2014 , 2016 ), especially to connected text reading. However, text stimuli of the current study consisted of only relatively short newspaper articles that tend to work differently than longer connected texts ( Wallot et al, 2013 , 2019 ). Accordingly, future studies need to validate the current findings on longer text stimuli.…”

“…It might be the case that this is a result of comparatively short trial length. There are startup transients in reading tasks that span over multiple up to several hundred fixations of word reading times, leading to initially higher variability in reading task performance as would be expected for the whole task ( Wallot et al, 2013 , 2019 ). Also, different tasks produce somewhat different eye movement dynamics, and parsing such records can sometimes lead to systematically different estimates of fixation durations ( Karsh & Breitenbach, 2021 ).…”

Unidimensional and Multidimensional Methods for Recurrence Quantification Analysis with crqa

“…Recurrence-based techniques allow the quantification of temporal structure and generalized autocorrelation properties of individual time series [2,3], the quantification of bivariate relationships and coupling between two time series [4,5], as well as the quantification of multidimensional dynamics of multivariate time series [6,7]. Recurrence-based techniques originate from the description and analysis of dynamical systems [8,5], and have been widely applied to data from physics [9,10,11,12,13], physiology [14,15,16,17,18,19], and psychology [20,21,22,23,24,25], to name a few fields.…”