Regularities in Reading Times

The project is concerned with predicting text comprehension from reading process measures.

The process of skilled reading is usually marked by fast information processing, as well as a systematic coupling between reading process and text. The problem is, however, that reading speed has an ambiguous relationship to text comprehension, and reading speed components are not very predictive of text comprehension. Also, coupling between reading process and text is usually assessed by correlating process measures (response times, eye movements...) with linguistic text features (lexical, semantical, syntactical and coherence-related text descriptors...). However, the strength of this correlation varies systematically between different languages.The current project advances the hypothesis that reading time regularity (RTR) can serve as a new metric that predicts reading comprehension from reading process measures.