Parker, Adam J;
Räsänen, Milla;
Slattery, Timothy J;
(2023)
What is the optimal position of low‐frequency words across line boundaries? An eye movement investigation.
Applied Cognitive Psychology
10.1002/acp.4036.
(In press).
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Abstract
When displaying text on a page or a screen, only a finite number of characters can be presented on a single line. If the text exceeds that finite value, then text wrapping occurs. Often this process results in longer, more difficult to process words being positioned at the start of a line. We conducted an eye movement study to examine how this artefact of text wrapping affects passage reading. This allowed us to answer the question: should word difficulty be used when determining line breaks? Thirty-nine participants read 20 passages where low-frequency target words were either line-initial or line-final. There was no statistically reliable effect of our manipulation on passage reading time or comprehension despite several effects at a local level. Regarding our primary research question, the evidence suggests that word difficulty may not need to be accounted for when determining line breaks and assigning words to new lines.
Type: | Article |
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Title: | What is the optimal position of low‐frequency words across line boundaries? An eye movement investigation |
Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
DOI: | 10.1002/acp.4036 |
Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.4036 |
Language: | English |
Additional information: | © 2023 The Authors. Applied Cognitive Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Experimental Psychology |
URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10163084 |
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