Identifying Context-Dependent Modes of Reading

摘要

Past literature has suggested that reading text as a whole cannot be reduced to merely an aggregation of sentence processing, but instead there are expected to be some context-dependent stylistic differences in the reading process. It has been, however, difficult to capture such context-dependent reading styles or modes. In this study, under the hypothesis that the statistics of reading time reflects such reading modes, we introduce a new statistical approach to capture them. Our analysis of the distributions of reading times identified two distinct modes of reading. In further analysis, we found that the temporal profiles of the two reading modes were correlated to the reader's degree of engagement. We discuss how the context dependency of the reading modes is related to dynamic construction of the reader's knowledge of narratives.