microrobert
08-14-2014, 04:35 PM
Reading Literature on Screen: A Price for Convenience?
Do people read as well on screens as they do on paper? Scientists aren’t quite sure. While the type of E Ink used in the latest generation of Kindles and other tablets has been shown to be as or even more legible than printed text, other studies have indicated that — in terms of reading comprehension — the medium doesn’t much matter.
But a forthcoming paper by researchers in France and Norway suggests that there may be some cognitive drawbacks to reading even short works of literature on a screen.
A team of researchers led by Anne Mangen at the University of Stavanger in Norway and Jean-Luc Velay at Aix-Marseille Université in France divided 50 graduate students — with equivalent reading habits and experience with tablets — into two groups and had them read the same short story by Elizabeth George (in French translation). One group read the story in paperback, the other on an Amazon Kindle DX. All the while, researchers measured the students’ reading time and their “emotional response” — using a standard psychology scale — to the text. Afterward, they were tested extensively on different aspects of the story.
In most respects, there was no significant difference between the Kindle readers and the paper readers: the emotional measures were roughly the same, and both groups of readers responded almost equally to questions dealing with the setting of the story, the characters and other plot details.
But, the Kindle readers scored significantly lower on questions about when events in the story occurred. They also performed almost twice as poorly when asked to arrange 14 plot points in the correct sequence.
“It’s interesting to us that the differences were both related to time and temporality — why is that?” said Ms. Mangen, who presented her team’s study last month at a conference in Turin, Italy.
She said more research is needed to understand what’s lost by reading literature on screen. She added that the type of text, the device used, and the background experience of the reader could all influence the outcome.
“It’s all one complex web that we need to start disentangling,” she said.
The study might still provide fodder for those who insist that reading a novel on a screen just isn’t the same. “It’s a confirmation that these ergonomic dimensions, the tactile feedback of holding paper, might actually matter,” she said.
http://www.slate.fr/sites/default/files/photos/liseuse.png
Log In - The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/arts/reading-literature-on-screen-a-price-for-convenience.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0)
Do people read as well on screens as they do on paper? Scientists aren’t quite sure. While the type of E Ink used in the latest generation of Kindles and other tablets has been shown to be as or even more legible than printed text, other studies have indicated that — in terms of reading comprehension — the medium doesn’t much matter.
But a forthcoming paper by researchers in France and Norway suggests that there may be some cognitive drawbacks to reading even short works of literature on a screen.
A team of researchers led by Anne Mangen at the University of Stavanger in Norway and Jean-Luc Velay at Aix-Marseille Université in France divided 50 graduate students — with equivalent reading habits and experience with tablets — into two groups and had them read the same short story by Elizabeth George (in French translation). One group read the story in paperback, the other on an Amazon Kindle DX. All the while, researchers measured the students’ reading time and their “emotional response” — using a standard psychology scale — to the text. Afterward, they were tested extensively on different aspects of the story.
In most respects, there was no significant difference between the Kindle readers and the paper readers: the emotional measures were roughly the same, and both groups of readers responded almost equally to questions dealing with the setting of the story, the characters and other plot details.
But, the Kindle readers scored significantly lower on questions about when events in the story occurred. They also performed almost twice as poorly when asked to arrange 14 plot points in the correct sequence.
“It’s interesting to us that the differences were both related to time and temporality — why is that?” said Ms. Mangen, who presented her team’s study last month at a conference in Turin, Italy.
She said more research is needed to understand what’s lost by reading literature on screen. She added that the type of text, the device used, and the background experience of the reader could all influence the outcome.
“It’s all one complex web that we need to start disentangling,” she said.
The study might still provide fodder for those who insist that reading a novel on a screen just isn’t the same. “It’s a confirmation that these ergonomic dimensions, the tactile feedback of holding paper, might actually matter,” she said.
http://www.slate.fr/sites/default/files/photos/liseuse.png
Log In - The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/arts/reading-literature-on-screen-a-price-for-convenience.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0)