Books as Salvation from Stiffness… Taras Shevchenko of the Time of Exile in the Dimension of his Reading

The study refutes the idea that existed in the minds of some Shevchenko era’s cultural figures, about Taras Shevchenko’s lack of education and poor literacy. For this purpose, the history of the poet’s reading interests evolution in the most difficult period of his life, the period of exile (1847–1857) was analyzed. His own direct testimonies (epistolary, diary, memoirs of relatives and acquaintances, etc.) were involved in the analysis. The study clarified how the disgraced artist’s previous habit of reading and the need to do it was established. The main focus was on Shevchenko’s reading behavior in the Orsk Fortress and in the Aral Expedition, in the Novopetrovsk Fortress. It relates to the active search, selection and perception of books, and even to special communication establishing. The study traces persons, who valued such poet’s behavior and stimulated it, also how functional Shevchenko’s current reading turned out to be at that period. Its composition was outlined as Russian, Ukrainian and Polish books, mainly in the field of fiction literature and literary criticism, as well as works on history, culturology, ethnology, natural and other fields of knowledge. Only due to reading and to his own artistic work the artist's spirit was saved from psychological exhaustion. Reading contributed to the intellectualization of his work. Shevchenko as a reader completely realized himself in exile considering special circumstances (loneliness, forced self-centeredness), his reading for the first time was not episodic, but complete, sometimes the leading form of the poet’s creative activity.

Why subtitle speed matters: Evidence from word skipping and rereading

High subtitle speed undoubtedly impacts the viewer experience. However, little is known about how fast subtitles might impact the reading of individual words. This article presents new findings on the effect of subtitle speed on viewers’ reading behavior using word-based eye-tracking measures with specific attention to word skipping and rereading. In multimodal reading situations such as reading subtitles in video, rereading allows people to correct for oculomotor error or comprehension failure during linguistic processing or integrate words with elements of the image to build a situation model of the video. However, the opportunity to reread words, to read the majority of the words in the subtitle and to read subtitles to completion, is likely to be compromised when subtitles are too fast. Participants watched videos with subtitles at 12, 20, and 28 characters per second (cps) while their eye movements were recorded. It was found that comprehension declined as speed increased. Eye movement records also showed that faster subtitles resulted in more incomplete reading of subtitles. Furthermore, increased speed also caused fewer words to be reread following both horizontal eye movements (likely resulting in reduced lexical processing) and vertical eye movements (which would likely reduce higher-level comprehension and integration).

Exploring the development of early reading literacy and story narrative among young children

While numerous studies have examined the development of reading literacy and language skills of older primary and middle school-aged children, comparably little research focuses on those of younger children. The present study investigates the links between early reading literacy – including reading behavior, comprehension, and engagement–and narrative skills among children aged from 3 to 6. Eighty-five children participated in a picture book reading activity and a storytelling task. Their early reading literacy was rated during a child-led picture book reading, and their narrative skills were scored using the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument. Although the children’s development varied greatly in three early reading literacy sub-dimensions, we found a significant developmental tendency and a correlated relationship between early reading literacy and narrative skills among young children. The preschool children’s reading initially focused on pictures and gradually transferred to print as their age increased. Moreover, their reading behavior, comprehension and engagement had a predictive effect on narrative structure and linguistic development. This study suggests that school-based practices for early reading instruction should focus on children’s reading literacy and narrative skills in the future.

A Global Book Reading Dataset

The choice of what to read is both influenced by and indicative of such factors as a person’s beliefs, culture, gender, and socioeconomic status. However, obtaining data including such personal attributes, as well as detailed reading habits and activities of individuals is difficult and would usually require either (i) data from e-readers, such as the Amazon Kindle, or from library checkouts, both of which are hard to obtain, or (ii) distributing questionnaires and conducting interviews, which can be expensive and suffers from recall bias. In this study, we present a dataset of over 40 million reading instances of 1,872,677 unique individuals collected from Goodreads. Goodreads is a book-cataloging social media platform with millions of users, where users share comments on the books they have read, while creating and maintaining social connections. We enrich the dataset with gender and location information. The dataset presented in this study can be used to perform cross-national and cross-gender analyses of reading behavior among book enthusiasts.

Using Virtual Reality to Assess Reading Fluency in Children

Here we provide a proof-of-concept for the use of virtual reality (VR) goggles to assess reading behavior in beginning readers. Children performed a VR version of a lexical decision task that allowed us to record eye-movements. External validity was assessed by comparing the VR measures (lexical decision RT and accuracy, gaze durations and refixation probabilities) to a gold standard reading fluency test—the One-Minute Reading test. We found that the VR measures correlated strongly with the classic fluency measure. We argue that VR-based techniques provide a valid and child-friendly way to study reading behavior in a school environment. Importantly, they enable not only the collection of a richer dataset than standard behavioral assessments but also the possibility to tightly control the environment.

Study of Reading and Behaviors Skills to Students with ADHD in South Peloponnese

This paper deals with the factors of reading and behaviors skills by the teaching of language courses to students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in the pandemic period covid-19. Methodologically, in parallel with the bibliographical study, used the pedagogical tool, which is referred to the Targeted Individual Structured and Integrated Program for Students with Special Educational needs (TISIPfSEN), in south region of Peloponnese to 15 boys on average 13,8 years old. The students’ reading behavior was recorded in manuscript and electronically protocols via mobile phone according the special education and training (SET). In addition, the views of those involved (19 parents, 28 teachers and 38 adults who work in the five educational care additional study centers) were sought with short questionnaires. The data were analyzed according the fundamental scientific knowledge.