Locus of interpretive and inference processes during text comprehension: A comparison of gaze durations and word reading times.

Abstract

This study investigated the locus of interpretive and inference processes during text comprehension. Two positions were contrasted: the buffer-integrate-purge position, which assumes that text-level interpretive and inference processes operate at sentence or clause boundaries, and the immediacy position, which assumes that interpretive and inference processes operate as soon as possible. We contrasted 2 methods of collecting word reading times: gaze durations and self-paced word reading times. In simple narrative passages, there was an increase in word reading times for end-of-clause words when self-paced reading times were collected, but there was a decrease when gaze durations were measured with eye tracking equipment