Lost in a Story, Detached from the Words

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between low- and high-level aspects of reading by studying the interplay between word processing, as measured with eye tracking, and narrative absorption and liking, as measured with questionnaires. Specifically, we focused on how individual differences in sensitivity to lexical word characteristics—measured as the effect of these characteristics on gaze duration—were related to narrative absorption and liking. By reanalyzing a large data set consisting of three previous eye-tracking experiments in which subjects (N = 171) read literary short stories, we replicated the well-established finding that word length, lemma frequency, position in sentence, age of acquisition, and orthographic neighborhood size of words influenced gaze duration. More importantly, we found that individual differences in the degree of sensitivity to three of these word characteristics, i.e., word length, lemma frequency, and age of acquisition, were negatively related to print exposure and to a lesser degree to narrative absorption and liking. Even though the underlying mechanisms of this relationship are still unclear, we believe the current findings underline the need to map out the interplay between, on the one hand, the technical and, on the other hand, the subjective processes of reading by studying reading behavior in more natural settings.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Kiel Christianson and one anonymous reviewer for their feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript. We would also like to thank Tobias Richter, Johanna Kaakinen, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability

Analysis scripts and data are available on the OSF https://osf.io/9zkx3/.

Supplementary materials

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. For variability in reading behavior in the context of reading development, see, e.g., Davies et al. (2017); Kliegl et al. (2004); Leinenger and Rayner (2017).

2. Excluding the data from this study from the final data set did not alter the pattern of results presented here.

3. These were mostly complex compounds such as chipszakgeritsel ‘the rustling sound made by a bag of crisps’ or diminutives such as koelkastmagneetje ‘small fridge magnet’.

4. Note that our research question could in principle also be answered in a single model by including interaction terms for the interactions between the word characteristics and SWAS, liking, and ART scores. However, to avoid issues of nonconvergence and interpretability related to the inclusion of the required high number of complex interaction terms, we decided to use the current approach.

5. Note that due to the partial pooling of data (the incorporation of many subjects’ data into one hierarchical model that maintains the nested structure of gaze duration within subjects), by-subject estimates of slope coefficients are shrunk toward the mean, and their magnitudes are therefore less extreme than they would be with no pooling (e.g., fitting a separate multiple regression model to each subject’s data). Such shrinkage prevents overfitting, making the coefficients estimated from the hierarchical model more appropriate for our purposes than coefficients from separate regression models (see Gelman & Hill, 2006).

6. We kindly thank Tobias Richter and an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

7. We kindly thank Kiel Christianson for this suggestion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) under Vidi Grant [276-89-007] awarded to Roel Willems and Veni Grant [VI.Veni.191G.001] awarded to Myrthe Faber.