Diversidad y diferencia

From the results in chapter 5, several conclusions can be drawn. Regarding the first part of research question 1, whether examinees respond significantly faster to sentences inferable from a text than to unrelated sentences after reading a text, the results from this study show that related sentences are responded to significantly faster than other types of sentences in a sentence verification task following passage reading. This difference in response speed is not dependent on the type of reading task completed during passage reading. Regarding the second part of research question 1, the extent to which inference generation predicts variance in comprehension task outcomes (scores) independent of proficiency and individual differences, the results from this study show that A) inference generation only influences reading outcomes when the measured reading score is explicitly designed around an aspect of reading where inferencing is critical (i.e. mental modeling in the summary task) and B) the impact of inferencing on scores is secondary to that of Morpho-syntactic proficiency and intrinsic motivation when it is predictive of scores.

Chapter 6 presented findings from analyses of eye-tracking metrics measured during online reading comprehension task completion. This study is unique in that rather than

comparing eye-tracking measures between participant groups (e.g. high and low skilled readers) or measuring eye-tracking in relation to specific lexical and syntactic features, this study

compares eye-tracking metrics between different reading tasks and task performance. In response to the first part of research question 2, eye-tracking metrics were able to distinguish reading during each of the three test tasks. Reading during MC tasks was marked by more fixations per line dwell, shorter fixation durations, fewer overall fixations, shorter average saccades, and fewer transitions between text and task. Reading during the cloze tasks was marked by more overall fixations per word, longer mean fixation durations on the reading text, and more fixations per paragraph dwell. Reading during the summary task was marked by longer fixation durations on the task area compared to the other tasks, longer average saccades, and more transitions between text and task. The tasks elicited different reading patterns, and the reading patterns related to higher scores on the tasks also differed.

Regarding the second part of question 2, eye-tracking metrics contributed predictive power to models of scores in each comprehension task. On the MC task, score was related to some of the reading behaviors already associated with the MC task. Higher scores were predicted by shorter mean fixation duration on questions, fewer fixations per word on the questions, and fewer transitions between text and questions. The former two metrics were predictive of score, indicating more efficient attention to the questions predicted MC score. In this way, success on the MC task was a matter of less is more.

Although the reading behavior the cloze task elicited involved more fixations on the text and cloze blanks and longer mean text fixations, cloze score was negatively correlated with duration of fixation and attention to cloze blanks in terms of transitions and fixations per blank. This is consistent with previous research which found that efficient fixation is related to

comprehension (Bax, 2013; Rayner et al., 2006). Unlike in the case of the MC task, where the behavior elicited by the task was also conducive to higher scores, the behavior associated with

cloze tasks, e.g. longer fixation durations on the text, were not beneficial to higher scores.

Despite the negative correlations with fixation duration, in the full model predicting cloze scores, there was a positive interaction between Morpho-syntactic proficiency, reasoning, and fixation duration, indicating that higher levels of Morpho-syntactic proficiency and reasoning could offset the negative impact of making longer fixations on cloze score. A main effect for shorter fixations was also predictor of higher scores, meaning that at mean Morpho-syntactic proficiency and reasoning scores (or lower), processing efficiency was an important predictor of higher cloze score. Positive main effects on cloze score also were found for higher proficiency and reasoning.

So far, the models predicting scores have showed that with eye-movement behavior during text reading, less is more. Conversely, summary scores showed positive correlations with text-to-task transitions as well as number of text fixations, but still showed a negative correlation with text fixation duration. Similar to the cloze model, in the predictive model of summary scores, there was an interaction between motivation, Morpho-syntactic proficiency, and mean fixation duration. The interaction effect was positive on summary score, indicating that as any of the three factors increase, the positive impact of the other factors increases. For Morpho-

syntactic proficiency and motivation, which also had positive main effects in the summary score model, this showed that these individual differences can reinforce their impact on summary performance. For text fixation duration, which alone had a negative main effect on summary scores, the positive interaction indicates that increases in motivation and/or Morpho-syntactic proficiency can mitigate the negative impact of slower processing. An additional predictor of higher summary scores was higher numbers of text fixations, which was a moderate predictor of higher score independent of other variables. This shows that summary writing is benefited by a

combination of proficiency, motivation, and efficient text processing, but also predicted by global text attention.