How features of digital text affect reading efficiency and comprehension

Literature review

Abstract

As information technologies enter our life, our behaviour changes: we work and study in new ways. Digital text is a technology that plays a unique role in the modern world. Such text dramatically changes the ways we read, search for information and browse through pages. Moreover, we start to work with a text in different modalities: reading and writing at the same time. This is why it is important to study new technologies from the scientific — psychological — point of view.

Differences between reading paper and screen-based texts have been studied from the time first screens appeared. These differences stem not only from the use of screens, but also from hypertext and different text structure. We identify two groups of factors that affect the reading process: features of the text itself and readers’ individual psychological traits. In this paper, we focus on the former. From this point of view, reading process is affected by font size, face and colour, screen brightness and size, navigation tools and how convenient they are. E-reading is different in terms of how quickly, accurately and attentively we can read, how we navigate through a text and how quickly we get tired. Although by these metrics a digital text is generally inferior to paper one, it excels it in terms of flexibility and potential for tailoring it to a specific task. For instance, you can automatically search through a digital text where you would have to skim through a paper one. The structure of the text, meta information and hyperlinks also affect reading process a lot. The research results here are ambiguous. High-level cognitive processes are unlikely to be directly affected by text features, it seems that they are largely defined by reader’s own psychological traits.