Interdiscourse Switching in Drama Text. Gaze Patterns and Comprehension Check Results

Abstract

The study explores the cognitive process of interdiscourse switching which occurs in reading drama plays with the author’s discourse fragments incorporated (Areas of Interest). The oculographic experiment reveals the gaze patterns and the discourse interpretation patterns, more and less typical of the process. The experiment is preceded by the parametric and annotation analysis of interdiscourse switching construal. Interestingly, there exist several construal parameter groups contingent with eye movement load redistribution, among them are Participant construal, Event construal, and Perspective construal. The results sufficed to show that construal effects also affect mentioning Areas of Interest in the subjects’ responses, the most significant influence is displayed by Participant Agentivity and Complexity parameters as well as by Event Type parameters.

Gaze behavior in single-page monomodal and cross-modal switches as affected by Event construal

“…The proposed Event-modelling Framework is grounded in cognitive linguistics construal theories [22,32] which have been implemented in experimental studies [7,19], although the construal operations are scarcely if ever observed on a systemic basis. For instance, EMF was tested in eye tracking research in [10] where it allowed to determine the effects of space construal and agentivity in textual descriptions presented together with the images.…”