THE EFFECT OF SELECTED DISCOURSE VARIABLES ON THE VISUAL PROCESSING OF LEFT- AND RIGHT-EMBEDDED SENTENCES BY COMPETENT ADULT READER

Purpose of the Study. The purpose of the study was to obtain and analyze data concerning the visual processing of competent adult readers while reading sentences within paragraphs to discover whether the processing of those sentences varied as a result of thematic factors within the preceding paragraph and syntactic structure within the target sentences. The study focused on the processing of left-embedded and right-embedded structures in foregrounded paragraphs, backgrounded paragraphs, and inferred paragraphs. The behaviors measured were number of total movements, number of forward fixations, number of regressions, duration of forward fixations, duration of regressions, duration of gaze, and total reading time.;Materials. Materials used in this study consisted of thirty-six separate paragraphs. Each paragraph was constructed around a target sentence. There were six target sentences, each of which had a left-embedded form and a right-embedded form. The six pairs of target sentences (left-embedded form and right-embedded form) were of the same length (nine words), were of active voice, and employed no dependent clauses with the exception of the target embedding. Each of the target sentences was set in three conditions of paragraphs. The first condition explicitly introduced, thematized, and foregrounded the information in the target sentence (called the foregrounded condition). Within a foregrounded paragraph, the target sentence always appeared on the eighth line. The second condition of paragraphs was identical to the foregrounded paragraph; however, two sentences of semantically neutral filler to background the concepts in the target sentence were introduced immediately prior to the target sentence (called the backgrounded condition). Within the backgrounded paragraphs, the target sentence always appeared on the tenth line. The third condition consisted of paragraphs that were coherent in nature; however, no information within the target sentence was implicitly introduced prior to the target sentence (called the inferred condition).;Population and Procedures. The sample subjects used in this study consisted of thirty-six volunteer, adult, university graduate students. All participants were native English speakers. Subjects read seven selections silently: an EDL paragraph; a foregrounded, left-enbedded paragraph; a foregrounded, right-embedded paragraph; and an inferred, right-embedded paragraph. Their eye movements were recorded with the EDL Biometrics Reading Eye II.;Findings. Data concerning the visual processing behaviors were tested with analysis of variance. Statistically significant differences were found among the six conditions for each of the seven visual processing behaviors. Each of the conditions was then compared with each of the other conditions using Tukey's post hoc procedures.;Analysis of the data indicated that competent adult readers made statistically significant behavioral adjustments in their reading to accommodate either the information structure of the material or the syntactic structures of the sentence being read.;Implications of the Study. The results of the study indicated the following: (1)An examination of the means for the areas of visual behavior within the six conditions support the interactionist theories of reading comprehensions. The means for the visual processing behaviors were consistent in difficulty when they were rank ordered. The means indicated that the left-embedded syntactic structures in the inferred condition always presented the most processing difficulty. The structures with the lowest means were always the right-embedded structures in the foregrounded condition. (2)The results of the study supported the position that the given-new strategy is a microprocess in sentence comprehension. (3)The results of the study do not appear to support the hypothesis that special psychological status is given to the current topic of a discourse.