Fan, Xi and Reilly, Ronan (2020) Reading development at the text level: an investigation of surprisal and embedding-based text similarity effects on eye-movements in Chinese early readers. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 13 (6). ISSN 1995-8692

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Abstract

This paper describes the use of semantic similarity measures based on distributed representations of words, sentences, and paragraphs (so-called “embeddings”) to assess the impact of supra-lexical factors on eye-movement data from early readers of Chinese. In addition, we used a corpus-based measure of surprisal to assess the impact of local word predictability. Eye movement data from 56 Chinese students were collected (a) in the students’ 4th grade and (b) one year later while they were in 5th grade. Results indicated that surprisal and some text similarity measures have a significant impact on the momentto- moment processing of words in reading. The paper presents an easy-to-use set of tools for linking the low-level aspects of fixation durations to a hierarchy of sentence-level and paragraph-level features that can be computed automatically. The study is the first attempt, as far as we are aware, to track the developmental trajectory of these influences in developing readers across a range of reading abilities. The similarity-based measures described here can be used (a) to provide a measure of reader sensitivity to sentence and paragraph cohesion and (b) to assess specific texts for their suitability for readers of different reading ability levels.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Citation: Fan, X. & Ronan, R. (2020). Reading development at the text level: an investigation of surprisal and embedding-based text similarity effects on eye-movements in Chinese early readers. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 13(6):2. Digital Object Identifier: 10.16910/jemr.13.6.2 ISSN: 1995-8692 This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Keywords:	Eye movements; saccades; reading development; text effect;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Computer Science Faculty of Science and Engineering > Maynooth International Engineering College
Item ID:	15657
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.13.6.2
Depositing User:	Prof. Ronan Reilly
Date Deposited:	10 Mar 2022 17:15
Journal or Publication Title:	Journal of Eye Movement Research
Publisher:	Bern Open Publishing
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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