Victoria Johansson

Combined eyetracking and keystroke-logging methods for studying cognitive processes in text production

Writers typically spend a certain proportion of time looking back over the text that they have written. This is likely to serve a number of different functions, which are currently poorly understood. In this article, we present two systems, ScriptLog+TimeLine and EyeWrite, that adopt different and complementary approaches to exploring this activity by collecting and analyzing combined eye movement and keystroke data from writers composing extended texts. ScriptLog+TimeLine is a system that is based on an existing keystroke-logging program and uses heuristic, pattern-matching methods to identify reading episodes within eye movement data. EyeWrite is an integrated editor and analysis system that permits identification of the words that the writer fixates and their location within the developing text. We demonstrate how the methods instantiated within these systems can be used to make sense of the large amount of data generated by eyetracking and keystroke logging in order to inform understanding of the cognitive processes that underlie written text production.

Perceiving and Producing the Frog Story

Consider the screen-shot in Figure 1. It is derived from a recording of a computerbased narrative task, using the word-less picture story Frog where are you? (Mayer, 1969) as elicitation instrument (see also Berman & Slobin 1994). The screen-shot was taken 2 minutes and 58 seconds into the recording. At that point, the subject, a 23-year old Swedish university student, had just finished writing in relation to the first picture (out of twenty-four) of the story. How can we get a handle on the processes behind the product in figure 1? How did the flow of writing interact with the distribution of visual attention? These are the main questions addressed in the present paper. Starting from some preliminaries in reading and writing research, we take the step to presenting a methodology and an analysis example from a new research project1 where computer logging of writing activity is combined with eyetracking to derive a profile of the interaction between picture viewing and writing during the production of a picture-elicited narrative.

Writing intervention in university students with normal hearing and in those with hearing impairment : Can observational learning improve argumentative text writing?

Abstract Observational learning has shown to be a successful intervention for writing. Until now, however, studies have only been performed with normal-hearing participants, usually high school or university students. Additionally, there have been conflicting results in whether subjective text quality correlates with one or more objectively measured text characteristics. In this study, we measured the effect of observational learning in a group of four university students with hearing impairment, and compared the results with those of a group of 10 students with normal hearing who did the same intervention, and those of a control group consisting of 10 students with normal hearing who did not do the intervention. Subjective text quality ratings and nine objectively measured text characteristics were collected for three argumentative texts written by each of the participants. In between writing these three texts, the participants in the experimental groups watched a video of a model writer who read out loud and corrected a similar kind of text. The statistical analysis showed significant correlations between the subjective ratings and four out of the nine objective measures, but no significant intervention effect. These findings suggest that observation-learning intervention is most effective when the model writer is a peer learner, and when the intervention is stretched out over time. Additionally, the method may be better suited for learners younger than the ones who were included in the present study.

Chapter 4.00.08: Text Production in Handwriting versus Computer Typing

There are several interesting differences between handwriting and computer typing. For instance, the physical movements during handwriting consist of different trajectories and acceleration patterns depending on the written letter and the writers visual attention is typically at the same location as the physical production of the text. This chapter compares global differences in text production patterns between computer typing and handwriting. It discusses how the different visual feedback from the emerging text in these two input modes influences the text production process. Ten university students, six females and four males, participated in the experiment. A within subjects ANOVA revealed no significant difference in pause proportion between the two input modes. For proportion reading a significant main effect revealed that during computer typing the participants spent significantly more of their time reading than during handwriting. Keywords: computer typing; handwriting; pause proportion; text production