[Brown Bag], Dr. Renan C. Ferreira, “Reading across genres: eye-movement evidence from Brazilian Portuguese.” 

Please join us for our next Brown Bag speaker event on Tuesday, 27 January, 2:30pm, at LRW 4018. Dr. Renan C. Ferreira will present a paper titled “Reading across genres: eye-movement evidence from Brazilian Portuguese.” Many of you will remember Dr. Renan C. Ferreira. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Federal University of Pelotas, Brazil and has been a visiting researcher at ARiEAL and MELD on numerous occasions.

Abstract:
Readers adjust how they read depending on the genre, yet little is known about how genre shapes reading behavior. In this talk, I look at how text genre shapes eye-movement behavior in Brazilian Portuguese using data from RastrOS, a corpus of authentic journalistic, popular science, and literary paragraphs. I first examine genre differences at the text level using computational measures of textual complexity, and then zoom in on word-by-word eye-movement data. The analyses show that genre effects emerge mainly during later stages of processing, suggesting that different genres encourage distinct reading strategies rather than simply varying in difficulty.