Reading Styles on a Newspaper Spread - semiotic analysis and eye movement analysis

The main objective of the project was to investigate individual variation in newspaper reading. Methodologically, it was linked to previous research in newspaper reading, design, eye movement measurements, sociosemiotics, discourse analysis, genre theory and genre analysis. The uniqueness of our project was the multi-disciplinary combination of cognitive science, linguistics and discourse analysis

The results of our research shows e.g. that
• there is an individual variation in newspaper reading in form of reading styles,
• there are groups of people who read in different ways (intensive readers, selective readers, skimmers)
• these reading styles can partly be explained by the readers' personal preferences, daily reading routines, by their interests, associations and experiences,
• there are complex texts belonging to several genres that are read in various ways; this can be explained by the fact that daily press is striving to satisfy different reader groups' varied interests and needs

The results are of interest to several scientific fields such as semiotics, genre theory, discourse analysis, media and communication studies, journalism, research, cognitive research, and design.