英文読解に要する処理労力と文章の言語的特徴の関係

眼球運動測定を用いた検討

抄録

This study examined the relationship between the processing effort required to read a text in English as a foreign language (EFL) and the text's linguistic features. The study reanalyzed eye movement data from the author's previous study (Nahatame, 2021) as an indication of the processing effort, which were collected from Japanese graduate and undergraduate students reading English texts. The data provided four eye movement measures: average fixation duration, average saccade length, skipping rate, and regression rate. The reading texts were assessed by employing a computational tool for not only simple linguistic features such as word and sentence length, but also more varied and complex features such as lexical sophistication, syntax complexity, and cohesion. The indices of these features were then used to develop statistical models to explain the variance in each of the four eye movement measures. The results showed that in most cases, complex linguistic features were more strongly related to eye movement data than simple features, and therefore they were included in the statistical models to account for eye movement data. Specifically, average fixation duration was explained by the verb semantic cohesion; saccade length was explained by the syntactic complexity (i.e., the number of words before the main verb), word hyponymy, and some cohesion indices; skipping was explained by several indices of cohesion; and regression was explained by word length and polysemy. These findings support the notion that complex linguistic features are helpful to explain processing effort during reading as evidenced by eye movements. Furthermore, they provide insights into cognitive processes of EFL reading.