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Reading during the composition of multi-sentence texts: an eye-movement study

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Abstract

Writers composing multi-sentence texts have immediate access to a visual representation of what they have written. Little is known about the detail of writers’ eye movements within this text during production. We describe two experiments in which competent adult writers’ eye movements were tracked while performing short expository writing tasks. These are contrasted with conditions in which participants read and evaluated researcher-provided texts. Writers spent a mean of around 13 % of their time looking back into their text. Initiation of these look-back sequences was strongly predicted by linguistically important boundaries in their ongoing production (e.g., writers were much more likely to look back immediately prior to starting a new sentence). 36 % of look-back sequences were associated with sustained reading and the remainder with less patterned forward and backward saccades between words (“hopping”). Fixation and gaze durations and the presence of word-length effects suggested lexical processing of fixated words in both reading and hopping sequences. Word frequency effects were not present when writers read their own text. Findings demonstrate the technical possibility and potential value of examining writers’ fixations within their just-written text. We suggest that these fixations do not serve solely, or even primarily, in monitoring for error, but play an important role in planning ongoing production.

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Notes

  1. We are not here concerned with fixations that occur concurrently with typing and/or on the word that is currently being typed, or fixations on the keyboard during typing. These are explicitly excluded from our analyses. We, therefore, analyze just situations in which the writer looks back into the text that they have already written. The nature and function of fixations on the word that is currently being typed are interesting but outside of present scope.

  2. This definition of sustained reading has previously been used to differentiate between reading and scanning behavior in newspaper reading (Holmqvist, Holsanova, Barthelson, & Lundqvist, 2003) and is consistent with how eye movement patterns have been characterized in previous reading research (cf. Engbert et al., 2002; Rayner, 1998). Rayner (1998), summarizing existing research, reports that when reading English, eye movement patterns are to a large degree characterized by saccades moving from left to right on the same line and further demonstrates that saccadic amplitudes above 25 letter spaces are virtually absent in such sequences (Rayner, 1998, figure 1). Regressions (saccades moving from right to left along the same line or back to previous lines) and return sweeps (saccades from the end of one line to the beginning of the next) are, thus, not included in this definition of sustained reading.

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Acknowledgments

The research reported in the first part of this paper was funded by the Swedish Research Council (grant no. 2009–2004) and supported by the Linnaeus Center for Thinking in Time: Cognition, Communication and Learning (CCL) at Lund University, which is funded by the Swedish Research Council (grant no. 349-2007-8695). We would like to thank Sol Simpson, Johan Dahl, Henrik Karlsson, and Sven Strömqvist for programming and other support. Preparation of this paper was supported by a grant to the first author from the Norwegian Reading Centre, University of Stavanger.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology Division, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

    Mark Torrance

  2. Department of Psychology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Roger Johansson

  3. Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Victoria Johansson

  4. Department of Swedish, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Åsa Wengelin

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  1. Mark Torrance
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  2. Roger Johansson
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Correspondence to Mark Torrance.

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Torrance, M., Johansson, R., Johansson, V. et al. Reading during the composition of multi-sentence texts: an eye-movement study. Psychological Research 80, 729–743 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-015-0683-8

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