How does noise while reading affect reading?



Some people like to read while having a drink at a cafe or on a moving train. On the other hand, many people find it difficult to concentrate on reading unless their home is quiet. A study conducted by Russian researchers found that auditory or visual noise while reading can have some effect on reading, but not on comprehension. was shown.

Do we rely on good-enough processing in reading under auditory and visual noise? | PLOS ONE

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0277429



A Strange Thing Happens When You Read Around Background Noise : ScienceAlert
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-strange-thing-happens-when-you-read-around-background-noise

In a paper published in PLOS ONE , an open-access peer-reviewed scientific journal, by Nina Zdorova, a researcher on language and the brain at HSE University in Moscow, Russia, and her colleagues, the researchers found that auditory noise such as sounds and speech, as well as typos and discomfort, A study was conducted on how much visual noise, such as certain expressions, disrupts the reading experience. 'Previous studies have reported that both auditory and visual noise have negative effects on reading smoothness and reading comprehension,' Zdrova said. 'No research has evaluated noise within the framework of language processing theory,' he says of the significance of the study.



First, in order to investigate the effects of auditory noise on reading, 71 participants were asked to read while listening to audio with overlapping conversations. Next, as a study on visual noise, 70 participants were asked to read a sentence in which other short words or phrases were placed next to the sentence being read aloud. The two experiments were conducted with participants wearing eye-tracking devices, and after reading, tests were also conducted to determine their level of understanding.

As a result, when it comes to auditory noise, participants were distracted by the audio playing in the podcast, staring at words or sentences to read the passage, or shifting their gaze back and forth between sentences to understand their meaning. I have more time to do it. However, because the time spent gazing at the text increased to process the noise, although the reading speed slowed down, it did not affect the comprehension of the text.

In addition, in the visual noise test, compared to when there were no extra words or phrases around the text to be read, the comprehension level of the text did not change and the reading speed improved. Contrary to their expectations, the researchers found that ``reading speed improves in the presence of noise.'' Researchers found that ``visual noise makes reading uncomfortable, so it makes you want to finish the reading task quickly.'' I'm guessing that he made it happen.



It was found that auditory and visual noise only affected reading time, not comprehension, but according to Zdrova, this result was predicted from the language processing theory that was based on the premise. It seems that it was. The two language processing theories studied are the `` noise recovery model '' and the `` sufficient information model .'' The noise recovery model is based on the assumption that language processing mechanisms are normally input with a ``sequence of error-free words,'' but they are able to detect individual words even if they contain errors such as noise or typos. This method reconstructs the meaning of the entire sentence by inferring it.

In addition, the sufficient information model means that our brains do not recognize all the details of text, but only 'enough words to understand', so our cognitive resources to deal with noise and errors are limited. The idea is that it is secured. Both the noise recovery model and the sufficient information model are semantic-based language processing theories that research has shown are faster than syntax-based language processing, which requires well-formed sentences.

However, the study only showed that semantic-based language processing thrives in the presence of noise, but it does not show that human language processing is semantically-based. In addition, Zdrova says that further research is important because various combinations of reading genres, difficulty levels of sentences, and types of noise are expected.

in Note, Posted by log1e_dh