Graphological and semantic foregrounding as affecting gaze and speech of impulsive and reflective readers

Abstract

The study explores the effects of graphological and semantic foregrounding on speech and gaze behavior in textual information construal of subjects with higher and lower impulsivity. Eye movements of sixteen participants were recorded as they read drama texts with interdiscourse switching (semantic foregrounding), with features of typeface distinct from the surrounding text (graphological foregrounding). Discourse modification patterns were analyzed and processed in several steps: specification of participant/object/action/event/perspective modification, parametric annotation of participants’ discourse responses, contrastive analysis of modification parameter activity and parameter synchronized activity. Significant distinctions were found in eye movement parameters (gaze count and initial fixation duration) in subjects with higher and lower impulsivity when reading parts of text with graphological foregrounding. Impulsive subjects tended to visit the areas more often with longer initial fixations than reflective subjects, which is explained in terms of stimulus-driven attention, associated with bottom-up processes. However, these differences in gaze behavior did not result in pronounced distinctions in discourse responses, which were only slightly mediated by impulsivity/reflectivity.

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

“…Still, we specified the foregrounding cues which produced higher gaze costs: first letter capitalization, tabulation, full stop, comma, dots, colon. We hypothesized that initial or final discursive act foregrounding cues make information more accessible for the impulsive readers, which conforms to the results received in the previous research [10]. Linguistic foregrounding does not produce such significant effects.…”

“…For instance, in [24; 28] the readers' cognitive style explored via impulsivity and reflectivity was reported to have affected the reaction time and the number of errors made. In [10] it was found that impulsive readers' gaze behavior as opposed to the gaze behavior of reflective readers was more affected by graphological foregrounding cues, which was attributed to the differences in their attention types, bottom-up and top-down attention, consistent with the notion of the impulsive-reflective cognitive style [23]. Overall, the impulsive and reflective styles are treated as a "property of the cognitive system that combines individuals' decision-making time and their performance in problem-solving situations, which involve a high degree of uncertainty" [24: 451].…”