Exploring the link between re-reading and comprehension

当人们理解所读内容有困难时，他们往往会回过头来重读一部分内容。换句话说，你的眼睛在阅读英语时不会持续地从左到右移动。相反，当你回过头去看之前读过的一段或多段文字时，你的眼球运动经常会被打断。人们一直认为，回到句子的前面部分有助于读者理解全文。虽然多次阅读整篇文章确实会导致更详细的理解，但目前还没有研究表明读者的选择性向后眼球运动与早期误解的特定纠正有关，甚至与更准确的理解有关。我们也不知道个体读者在重读方式上有何不同，也不知道个体重读行为的策略或模式是否与更好的阅读理解有关。阅读是学习、教育和日常生活的基础，阅读困难会阻碍各个领域的学习。因此，了解实时阅读行为与理解之间的关系至关重要。在正常的、熟练的默读过程中，大约15%的眼球运动返回到文本的较早部分（即，它们是“倒退的”）。回归通常是由对文本正常前进进程的某种破坏触发的，随后的重新阅读通常被解释为对先前阅读的部分或全部文本的重新分析、修订或重新处理。这种再处理通常被认为是读者得到了更准确、语法更合理的解释的标志。然而，在心理语言学和阅读文献中，这些重读行为对理解的实际影响在很大程度上是假设的。此外，研究还没有将重读的各个方面（回归的位置、重读时的扫描路径、重读所花费的时间等）与阅读理解教育评估中常用的理解探针的准确率联系起来。提出的项目包括三个系列的眼动追踪实验来检验(1)回归的触发因素；(2)重读时进行的再处理类型；(3)重读对阅读理解的影响；(4)重复阅读和文本理解的工作记忆容量和阅读流畅性的个体差异。该项目是一个大规模的系统探索的基本假设，即重读提高理解。拟议工作的结果将为心理语言学、心理学、阅读、教育、语言学和STEM教学等领域提供信息——实际上，任何依赖于从文本中提取复杂信息的领域。

When people have trouble understanding what they are reading, they tend to go back and re-read a portion of the text. In other words, your eyes don't continuously move left to right when reading English. Instead, your eye movements are often interrupted as you return to look at one or more previously read portions of the text. It has been assumed that returning to earlier parts of a sentence helps the reader understand the text. Although reading an entire text multiple times does result in a more detailed understanding, no studies have yet shown that readers' selective backwards eye movements are related to specific corrections of earlier misinterpretations or even to more accurate understanding. It is also not known how individual readers differ with respect to how they re-read, or whether individual strategies or patterns of re-reading behavior are related to better reading comprehension. Reading is fundamental to learning, education, and daily life and reading difficulties can hinder learning in all areas. Thus, understanding how real-time reading behaviors relate to comprehension is critically important.During normal, skilled silent reading, approximately 15% of eye movements return to earlier portions of the text (i.e., they are "regressive"). Regressions are typically triggered by some sort of disruption to the normal forward progress through the text and subsequent re-reading is typically interpreted as a reanalysis, revision, or reprocessing of some or all of the previously read text. This reprocessing is generally taken as an indication that the reader has derived a more accurate, grammatically licensed interpretation. However, in the psycholinguistic and reading literatures, the actual affect of these re-reading behaviors on comprehension has been largely assumed. Moreover, studies have not linked the various aspects of re-reading (location of regressions, scan paths during re-reading, time spent re-reading, as so on) to accuracy rates on comprehension probes of the type often used in educational assessments of reading comprehension. The proposed project includes three series of eye-tracking experiments that examine (1) the triggers for regressions; (2) the type of reprocessing performed during re-reading; (3) the influence of re-reading on reading comprehension; and (4) individual differences in working memory capacity and reading fluency on re-reading and text comprehension. The proposed project is a large-scale systematic exploration of the fundamental assumption that re-reading enhances comprehension. The results of the proposed work will inform the fields of psycholinguistics, psychology, reading, education, linguistics, and STEM instruction -- indeed, any area that relies on extracting complex information from text.