Exploring the Effect of Nominal Compound Structure in Scientific Texts on Reading Times of Experts and Novices
Isabell Landwehr, Marie-Pauline Krielke, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb
Abstract
We explore how different types of nominal compound complexity in scientific writing, in particular different types of compound structure, affect the reading times of experts and novices. We consider both in-domain and out-of-domain reading and use PoTeC (Jakobi et al. 2024), a corpus containing eye-tracking data of German native speakers reading passages from scientific textbooks. Our results suggest that some compound types are associated with longer reading times and that experts may not only have an advantage while reading in-domain texts, but also while reading out-of-domain.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.acl-srw.25
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Vienna, Austria
- Editors:
- Jin Zhao, Mingyang Wang, Zhu Liu
- Venues:
- ACL | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 396–408
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.acl-srw.25/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Isabell Landwehr, Marie-Pauline Krielke, and Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb. 2025. Exploring the Effect of Nominal Compound Structure in Scientific Texts on Reading Times of Experts and Novices. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 396–408, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Exploring the Effect of Nominal Compound Structure in Scientific Texts on Reading Times of Experts and Novices (Landwehr et al., ACL 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.acl-srw.25.pdf