Dynamic text presentation in print interpreting – An eye movement study of reading behaviour

• Significantly more regressions with word-by-word format than with letter-by-letter.
• Regressions starting at the words that end a sentence were more than other words.
• Rereading was more with incorrectly typed or abbreviated words than other words.
• Text presentation format has a significant effect on reading behaviour.

Print interpreting supports people with a hearing disability by giving them access to spoken language. In print interpreting, the interpreter types the spoken text in real time for the hard-of-hearing client to read. This results in dynamic text presentation. An eye movement study was conducted to compare two types of dynamic text presentation formats in print interpreting: letter-by-letter and word-by-word. Gaze path analysis with 20 hearing participants showed different types of reading behaviour during reading of two pieces of text in these two presentation formats. Our analysis revealed that the text presentation format has a significant effect on reading behaviour. Rereading and regressions occurred significantly more often with the word-by-word format than with the letter-by-letter format. We also found a significant difference between the number of regressions starting at the words that end a sentence and that of regressions starting at all other words. The frequency of rereading was significantly higher for incorrectly typed or abbreviated words than for the other words. Analysis of the post-test questionnaire found almost equal acceptance of the word-by-word and letter-by-letter formats by the participants. A follow-up study with 18 hard-of-hearing participants showed a similar trend in results. The findings of this study highlight the importance of developing print interpreting tools that allow the interpreter and the client to choose the options that best facilitate the communication. They also bring up the need to develop new eye movement metrics for analysing the reading of dynamic text, and provide first results on a new dynamic presentation context.