Research Outputs
Google or Gutenberg generation: Chilean university studentsā reading habits and reading purposes
It has always been in the public interest to know the reading habits of readers of various ages and levels of schooling, as well as their opinions with regard to the consumption of reading materials. Lately, researchers have given increased attention to digital texts. Although progress on these topics has been made as reported in published research, there is yet incomplete information regarding readersā habits and opinions at university and professional levels. This study describes the self-reported habits of university students belonging to two disciplinary domains (Human Sciences and Economic and Business Sciences) regarding reading on paper or on digital media for three purposes: academic, entertainment, and information seeking. The results reveal that the readersā preferences vary according to the three purposes. These readers reported using different media but had a clear preference for paper; they also reported distinguishing between cognitive processes (memory, comprehension, and learning), with the discipline to which they belonged having no radical effect on their preferences. All of this leads us to conclude that currently there exists a generation in transition, a āGutenberg-Googleā generation, which still recognizes the relevance of paper, in particular for academic purposes.
Always look back: Eye movements as a reflection of anaphoric encapsulation in Spanish while reading the neuter pronoun ello
Eye movements constitute an important cue to understanding how readers connect textual information, particularly when an encapsulator pronoun must be anaphorically resolved in order to construct a coherent mental representation of the text being read. While existing research into anaphoric reference has predominantly focused on the distance between pronouns and referents and on their morphosyntactic features, no previously published studies have addressed the effect in causal contexts of varying extensions of the referent being encapsulated by a neuter pronoun. In the present research, we help fill this gap by studying the effects of online processing of the anaphoric neuter Spanish pronoun ello (āthisā in English) in causally-related texts using two varying referent extensions: short and long antecedent. A one factor repeated measures design was implemented. The results of three eye reading measures showed a fine-grained picture of encapsulation processes for seventy-two Chilean university students as they each read twelve texts. On the one hand, the reading times for processing the neuter pronoun ello AOI did not show statistically significant differences between the short and long conditions. On the other, the findings indicate that, in constructing referential and relational coherence in causally-related texts in Spanish, resolution of the neuter pronoun is in fact influenced by the extension of the referent.