Reading digital- versus print-easy texts: a study with university students who prefer digital sources

Abstract

The transition from on-paper to on-screen reading seems to make it necessary to raise some considerations, as a greater attentional effort has been claimed for print texts than digital ones. Not surprisingly, most university students prefer this digital medium. This research aims to examine reading times by contextualizing this phenomenon into two processes: namely, word recognition and reading comprehension task on paper and on screen. Thus, two different tasks-counterbalanced into digital and print mediums-were carried out per each participant with a preference for a digital medium: a reading comprehension task (RCT) and a lexical decision task (LDT) after reading a specific story. Participants were slower reading print texts and no statistically significant differences were found in RCT accuracy. This result suggests that the task required more cognitive resources under the print medium for those with a worse comprehension performance in reading, and a more conservative pattern in digital RCT for those with a better performance.

Keywords: Cognition load; Comprehension; Digital; Print; Reading; Shallowing hypothesis; Word recognition.

Fig. 1

RCT task. The task was counterbalanced in the order of presentation of reading material according to media type: digital or print (left versus right). Finally, written comprehension questions were asked in written form

Fig. 2

The classical LDT. The left-hand page is the paper adaptation for the LDT where participants crossed the words from pseudowords

Fig. 3

Bayes factor robustness check for differences between RCT time on screen and paper format

Fig. 4

Bayes factor robustness check for differences between LDT accuracy on digital and paper support

Fig. 5

Bayes factor robustness check for differences between RCT accuracy on digital and paper support