Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences / Age Factor and its Role in the Readers’ Comprehension of Stylistic Heterogeneity: Evidence from Eye Movements and Default Responses

Full text (.pdf)
Issue
Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences. 2020 13 (3)
Authors
Kiose, Maria I.
Contact information
Kiose, Maria I.: Center for Socio-сognitive Discourse Studies Moscow State Linguistic University Moscow, Russian Federation; ; ORCID: 0000-0001-7215-0604; Киосе, М.И.: Центр социокогнитивных исследований дискурса Московский государственный лингвистический университет Российская Федерация, Москва
Keywords
stylistically heterogeneous texts; readers’ comprehension; eye-tracking experiment; secondary school children; salience; eye movements and default responses
Abstract

The article discusses the role of the age factor in the readers’ comprehension of stylistically heterogeneous texts, here the text fragments containing figurative noun groups of salient and non-salient character. The salience effects on eye movement and default responses are studied in the oculographic experiment where the secondary school children had to read the sentences displaying figurativeness. The earlier detected statistically significant corpus salience indices of referential, linguistic and discourse parameters in figurativeness construal get verified experimentally. In accordance with the Graded Salience and Defaultness hypotheses I assumed that the interpretation of figurative noun groups of varied referential, linguistic and discourse salience will require different cognitive effort in terms of both eye movement reactions and default inferences. Several eye-tracking experiments with adult participants sufficed to prove the dependency, however, the results obtained with children did not support the Salience hypothesis in the part of visual perception. The eye movements of children facing figurative noun groups did not show steady correlation patterns with the salience effects of these groups, whereas the default interpretations correlated strongly with referential, linguistic, and discourse salience. The results show evidence in favor of Mixed-Effects Model of interpretation

Pages
394–406
DOI
10.17516/1997-1370-0562
Paper at repository of SibFU
https://elib.sfu-kras.ru/handle/2311/135162

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