Abstracts - Earli

EyeWrite: automatically coding fixation location during text productionMark Torrance, Staffordshire University, United KingdomDavid Galbraith, Staffordshire University, United KingdomMeaningful analysis of the focus of writers’ gaze within their text is problematic because the textthat the writer is looking at is continually changing in unpredictable ways. Methods used inreading research that require definition of fixed areas of interest are, therefore, of no use. However,manual coding from a playback of the writing session with a gaze-location overlay isimpracticably time consuming. EyeWrite editing and analysis software locates fixations in the textrather than as screen coordinates, and therefore allows measurement of the distance (in characters,words, sentences, paragraphs) between the last-inserted character and current fixation. We believethat these kinds of measurement are key to understanding reading-during-writing. In our paper wewill present a summary of the functionality of EyeWrite. We will then present a preliminarydescription of the main features of writers’ reading behaviour based on a sample of 10undergraduate psychology students writing short argumentative essays.Gazing at the keyboard or the monitor: Two different strategies in text productionRoger Johansson, Lund University, SwedenÅsa Wengelin, Lund University, SwedenVictoria Johansson, Lund University, SwedenKenneth Holmqvist, Lund University, SwedenIf the translation processes during writing operate fluently, they draw little on the limited workingmemory processes, something that provides the writer with more resources for planning andrevision. And when it comes to computer writing, an important aspect of translation fluency istyping skills. It has for example been shown that fast typists make fewer and shorter pauses thanslow typists and have longer and more productive execution-periods. It is generally assumed that askilled typist uses all her fingers and looks at the monitor most of the time while less skilled typistsare supposed to look more at the keyboard.In this paper we compare different aspects of thewriting process of "monitor-gazers" and "keyboard-gazers". One group of 15-year olds (N=20) andone group of university students (N=20) took part in the study. Equipped with an eye tracker allsubjects wrote an expository text in a keystroke logging program on a computer. Based on thedistribution of where the subjects looked during the text production they were categorized as eithermonitor-gazers or keyboard-gazers. The results indicate that the elder and thereby more advancedreaders and writers tend to be "monitor-gazers", that monitor-gazers looks at the keyboard in verybrief intervals, and that keyboard-gazers looks at the monitor and keyboard in a similar manner.Monitor-gazers write significantly faster and make significantly more keystrokes but do notproduce longer texts. This indicates that monitor-gazers edit their texts more than the keyboardgazers.One possible explanation for this could be that by continuously monitor their writing, themonitor gazers get a better overview of their texts and therefore better possibilities to edit theirtexts. Text quality, reading patterns, editing patterns and detailed analyses of fixations andsaccades are currently being analysed.– 124 –