Abstracts - Earli

Writers juggling error-detecting with sentence composing: Influences of cognitive load and errortypeThomas Quinlan, Educational Testing Service, USAMaaike Loncke, University of Ghent, BelgiumMarielle Leijten, University of Antwerp, BelgiumLuuk Van Waes, University of Antwerp, BelgiumIn the following two experiments, we examined proofreading in the context of sentencecomposing. We devised an experimental writing task in which participants corrected an embeddederror (orthographic near-neighbors or far-neighbors) and completed a sentence (using 1 or 3context words). Experiment 1 investigates how the cognitive demands of sentence composinginfluences proofreading performance. The results revealed that participants were more successfulat (a) integrating 1 context word than 3 context words and (b) correcting far-neighbor errors thannear-neighbor errors. In Experiment 2, we examine how sentence difficulty and error typeinfluences the adoption of writing strategies. The results of Experiment 2 revealed that both errortype and sentence complexity influenced the strategies of error-correcting. Participants most often(90% of the time) opted to complete the sentence before correcting the error. The eyetracking datarevealed that error-type also influenced how participants coped with correcting errors. In theanalysis of fixation transitions (into the error-zone), a significant main effect was revealed, withmore transitions for near-neighbor errors than far-neighbor errors. This investigation reveals howthe interplay of two factors, cognitive load and error-type, appears to influence how writerscoordinate error-detecting with sentence composing.K-means method to assess the visual strategy of the writer composing from sourcesDenis Alamargot, University of Poitiers, FranceGilles Caporossi, HEC Montreal, CanadaDavid Chesnet, University of Poitiers, FranceChristine Ros, University of Poitiers, FranceWriting from sources is a frequent task at the workplace and its importance increases with the useof computers. This task requires a double competence in both reading-extracting information andinventing-composing text. The ‘Eye and Pen’ system was designed to study these skills. Based ona synchronous recording of eye movements (via an eye-tracking system) and pen movement (via adigitizing tablet), the device provides a fine-grained description of the visual strategies used by thewriter while composing. To study these strategies, we recorded the graphomotor and eye activityof 25 adults while they were composing a procedural text by referring to documentary sources.From the visual patterns, some statistics are computed. One of them is the transition matrixindicating the frequency with which the eye moves from one zone to another zone. Other statisticssuch as the average number of different pieces of information explored when the eye leaves thewriting zone are also considered. From these various statistics, a measure of dissimilarity betweenrespondents is computed and clustering (K-means) is used to find groups of respondents withsimilar exploration patterns. The clustering results show that two groups of writers can beclassified regarding their visual exploration activity. Further investigations show that these twogroups also differ regarding their respective working memory capacity and age. We demonstratedthat K-Means is relevant here to distinguish various visual strategies during writing and this K-Means categorization seems to be cognitively valid.– 125 –