Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It does not do the act of reading literature any justice to de-scribe it as simply processing text to acquire information orknowledge. We enjoy reading stories, we become absorbed inthem. Our absorption into stories is related to their contextualstructure. We develop a statistical method for the analysis ofreading time distributions which allows us to assess the con-text of a story rather than merely its text. This analysis detectsstatistically distinct distributions of reading times, with eachdistribution representing a distinct process or mode of read-ing. Our experiments support the hypothesis that the temporalchange in these modes of reading are related to changes in thedegrees of absorption of the subjects and also in the contextualstructure of the stories being read.