Exploring the Effect of Nominal Compound Structure in Scientific Texts on Reading Times of Experts and Novices

Isabell Landwehr, Marie-Pauline Krielke, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb

Keywords: linguistic theories, cognitive modeling, psycholinguistics, compounds, reading behavior, background knowledge

Abstract: We explore how different types of nominal compound complexity in scientific writing, in particular different types of compound structure, affect the reading times of experts and novices. We consider both in-domain and out-of-domain reading and use PoTeC (Jakobi et al. 2024), a corpus containing eye-tracking data of German native speakers reading passages from scientific textbooks. Our results suggest that some compound types are associated with longer reading times and that experts may not only have an advantage while reading in-domain texts, but also while reading out-of-domain.

Archival Status: Archival

Paper Length: Long Paper (up to 8 pages of content)

Submission Number: 86