Character-based Surprisal as a Model of Reading Difficulty in the Presence of Errors
Table 2: Left: per-word reading times, fixation rates, and question accuracies in the experiment of Hahn:Keller:18, right: same measures for our experiments (same texts, but some of the words contain errors).
['[EMPTY]', 'Hahn & Keller', 'This experiment No error', 'This experiment Error']
Even for words with errors, the reading measures in our experiments are similar to the ones reported by \citeAHahn :Keller:18. For words without errors, we find slightly faster reading times and lower fixation rates than \citeAHahn:Keller:18. Also the accuracy (which can only be measured on the text level, hence we do not distinguish words with and without errors) is essentially unchanged. This provides good evidence for the claim that human readers cope well with errors in text: they take longer to read words with errors and fixate them more compared to words without errors, but this this is a comparatively small effect. Overall, reading times, fixation rates, and question accuracy are very similar to those found in texts without any errors (such as the ones used by \citeNPHahn:Keller:18).