Foregrounding and accessibility effects in the gaze behavior of the readers with different cognitive style

Abstract

This paper explores accessibility effects in the gaze behavior of readers with different cognitive style, impulsive and reflective, as mediated by graphological and linguistic foregrounding in the discursive acts in 126 areas of interest (AOIs). The study exploits 1890 gaze behavior probes available at open access Multimodal corpus of oculographic reactions MultiCORText. We identified that while graphological foregrounding makes initial or final components of discursive act more accessible for the impulsive readers, reflective readers also observe the components within the act. Linguistic foregrounding produces higher access with impulsive readers in case the linguistic form is visually focalized (phonological foregrounding and parallel structures); meanwhile, with reflective readers this is the information density appearing in elliptical and one-component sentences which maintains higher access.