Eye-tracking evidence for benefits from linguistically-driven text formatting while reading

Linguistically-driven automated text formatting (LDTF) provides real-time cues to readers via line breaks and indentations to render the hierarchical syntactic structure of sentences visible to the reader. This new method of text presentation has been shown to improve reading comprehension for elementary-age and adult English readers; however, no work until now has investigated the cognitive underpinnings of this novel tool. The current study examines eye-movements and reading comprehension while reading LDTF-formatted naturalistic texts and individual sentences containing complex grammatical structures. The goal is to better understand how the new format influences reading behaviors and how those reading behaviors relate to comprehension benefits. Results show that LDTF rapidly, within two one-hour sessions, leads to less overall rereading and more overall skipping while improving text comprehension, suggesting a boost in reading efficiency. In addition, readers appear be more sensitive to unexpected structures when scaffolded by the visual syntactic cues. These results suggest that even short term exposure to LDTF leads to benefits in the processing and comprehension of written text.