Repetition Effect within a Short Stories: An Eye Movements and Linear-Mixed Models study on a Spanish Corpus

KAMIENKOWSKI JE; CARBAJAL MJ; SIGMAN M; SHALOM DE

Lund

Conferencia; 17th European Conference on Eye Movements; 2013

Flexible thinking, the ability to combine arbitrary processes, is a hallmark of human thought. The studies on reading are vehicles to understand these capabilities. In particular, Repetition Effects were used to study word encoding and memory processes. Here we extend previous results comparing reading times between words in two successive paragraphs, to repetitions of a word within natural texts -short stories (~3000 words)-. We analyzed the evolution of fixations over successive repetitions that naturally appears in a text, studying average gaze durations and applying Linear Mixed Models. We found a decrease on fixation durations in words with low corpus frequency, but not for high frequency words, and both curves converged after 5/6 repetitions. The diminishing of gaze duration vary continuously with frequency, and depends on the distance between repeated words. We also found that this effect were not present in repetitions of words that share lemma but not the form. The results clearly showed repetition effects within the same natural text, and add new arguments on the discussion of the sources of the repetition effect. Also, this is one of the first studies using Linear-Mixed Models in a spanish corpus (Fernandez et al, 2013).