The Project involves eye tracking during the Reading process to examine how the type of anaphora (by repetition [Ana helps Cati. Ana has time] vs. pronominal [Ana helps Cati. She has time]) and its location in the text affects their processing in two groups with reading difficulties: readers with intellectual disabilities and readers with prelingual hearing impairment. It is intended to test the hypothesis that the Repeated Name Penalty, predicted by the Discourse Prominence Theory (Gordon & Hendrick, 1998) and that occurs in skilled readers, would not occur in these groups, but on the contrary, anaphora by repetition would be easier to process than pronominal anaphora, especially when there is a large distance between the antecedent and the anaphora (several sentences). This would be observed both in text comprehension and in the pattern of eye movements during the reading process (e.g. fewer number of ocular regressions and shorter fixation times per regression). The confirmation of this hypothesis would establish guidelines for the syntactic simplification of texts (e.g. adding an anaphora by repetition to decompose a long compound sentence into two simple sentence, for example, turning “Javi, who is going on vacation, lent his key to Juan” to “Javi lent his key to Juan. Javi is going on a vacation”), technique frequently used by automated simplification tools such as Systar (Canning and col., 2000) or Facilita (Watanabe and col., 2009) to facilitate reading and text comprehension in people with reading difficulties.

Example of a text with multiple anaphoric elements

Fajardo, Inmaculada (UV); Ávila, Vicenta (UV); Gil, Laura

University of Valencia