Constructing theoretically informed measures of pause duration in experimentally manipulated writing

AbstractThis paper argues that traditional threshold-based approaches to the analysis of pauses in writing fail to capture the complexity of the cognitive processes involved in text production. It proposes that, to capture these processes, pause analysis should focus on the transition times between linearly produced units of text. Following a review of some of the problematic features of traditional pause analysis, the paper is divided into two sections. These are designed to demonstrate: (i) how to isolate relevant transitions within a text and calculate their durations; and (ii) the use of mixture modelling to identify structure within the distributions of pauses at  different locations. The paper uses a set of keystroke logs collected from 32 university students writing argumentative texts about current affairs topics to demonstrate these methods. In the first section, it defines how pauses are calculated using a reproducible framework, explains the distincti on between linear and non-linear text transitions, and explains how relevant sections of text are identified. It provides Excel scripts for automatically identifying relevant pauses and calculating their duration. The second section applies mixture modelling to linear transitions at sentence, sub se ntence, between-word and within-word boundaries for each participant. It concludes that these transitions cannot be characterised by a single distribution of “cognitive” pauses. It proposes, further, that transitions ...
Source: Reading and Writing - Category: Child Development Source Type: research