Leitura de textos eletrônicos em inglês/LE: um estudo exploratório via rastreamento ocular

Abstract

The revolutions and changes provoked in the passage from printed text reading to electronic text reading continuously attract the interest for researching in the reading field. A vital element which is prototypical from most of the electronic texts, and consequently is worth of being more deeply studied is the hyperlink once it is, visually, one of the mechanisms which better distinguish the electronic text from the printed one. We aim at investigating the eye-behavior in the reading of electronic texts in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) when the eye meets a hyperlink in order to verify if, in fact, the presence of hyperlink, once it is a highlighted element in the text, favors or hampers the reading process based on the reading time. This research is based on studies about eye-reading movements (BALOTA; YAP; CORTESE, 2006; BRYSBAERT; VITU, 1998; JUST; CARPENTER, 1980; MACEDO et al., 2007; RAYNER, 1998; STAUB; RAYNER, 2007) concerning to online reading. In order to do this research we made use of an equipment called eye-tracker of 120Hz resolution which records the eye movement every 8 milliseconds to investigate the eye-movement behavior of 19 fluent EFL readers while reading silently 2 short texts in two versions each: one with hyperlinks and another one without. To analyze our data we used 3 different measures: Total Time of Fixation (TTF), Mean Time of Fixation (MTF) and Total Number of Fixations (TNF). The results showed that the target words which were hyperlinked in the experimental stimulus and the ones which were not hyperlinked in the control stimulus have a similar reading time with a total reading time difference of only 32,8 ms in favor of hyperlinks. This time period is so short that it is not even possible to extract new information by the eye during reading. Even though the results suggest the amount of reading time dedicated to the hyperlinks in isolation is very similar to the reading time of the target words which were not hyperlinked in the control stimulus, the total reading time of the entire texts with hyperlinks is superior to the total reading time of the entire texts without hyperlinks, approximately 22000 ms (twenty-two thousand milliseconds) suggesting, this way, the hyperlinks cause a negative impact towards the reading process, that is, the results seem to hamper the reading process in a way. Besides, hyperlinked words are skipped less frequently, maybe because they attract the eye attention due to the highlighted color being, then, more salient.