Null and overt pronouns and subordinate clauses in Catalan Easy Language: An eye-tracking study on adults with and without intellectual disabilities

Mariona González-Sordé, Olga Soler-Vilageliu, Izabela Krejtz & Krzysztof Krejtz

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Titre
Null and overt pronouns and subordinate clauses in Catalan Easy Language: An eye-tracking study on adults with and without intellectual disabilities

Résumé
Easy Language guidelines discourage the use of full overt pronouns and subordinate clauses. This study examines how manipulating these linguistic elements influences perceived reading difficulty, reader preference, and the cognitive effort involved in text processing. We also assessed the effects of null and overt pronouns on content comprehension. 26 adults with intellectual disabilities and 26 neurotypical adults participated in a mixed-design experiment involving two reading tasks. For both tasks, we recorded participants’ eye movements while they rated the perceived difficulty and reported their preference. Additionally, Task 1 included open-ended comprehension questions. The linguistic elements only had significant effects on fixation patterns and focal attention. Crucially, they did not significantly alter perceived text difficulty. These findings suggest that including subordinate clauses does not significantly hinder comprehension. However, further research is essential to guide the future development of Easy Language, as evidence is still limited regarding its additional linguistic and graphic features and the needs of different target groups..

Mots-clés
Easy Language, eye tracking, intellectual disability, pronouns, subordinate clauses, accessibility

DOI 10.17462/para.2026.02.01

Mariona González Sordé

Mariona González-Sordé

Mariona González-Sordé is a PhD candidate specializing in Easy Language and Media Accessibility at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Currently in the final stages of her PhD, she has spent the past four years testing linguistic and graphic aspects recommended or discouraged in Easy Language guidelines with people with intellectual disabilities. Her research examines how these elements affect comprehension and text processing using offline and online measures, including eye tracking. Her doctoral work has been carried out within the Transmedia Catalonia research group, and her work is driven by a strong passion for inclusive communication.

Olga Soler-Vilageliu

Olga Soler-Vilageliu is an Associate Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where she teaches psycholinguistics and cognitive processing to undergraduate students in Psychology and Speech Therapy. With a background in language processing, her research has focused on narrative and pragmatics development in children and, later, on the online measurement of handwriting in preschool and school-age children. As a member of the Transmedia Catalonia research group, she is currently setting up experiments on various accessibility services, mainly focusing on the quality of perception of Sign Language on TV and the emotional involvement of users of Audio Description and Audio Subtitling.

Izabela Krejtz

Izabela Krejtz is an associate professor of psychology at SWPS University, at the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Cognitive Studies. She is a distinguished cognitive psychologist with numerous peer-reviewed publications on the eye-tracking studies and daily well-being related to how people process visual information. She co-founded the Eye Tracking Research Center at SWPS University and regularly teaches experimental research methodology in the context of various eye-tracking applications. She is currently working now on media accessibility, with a focus on climate change communication.

Krzysztof Krejtz

Krzysztof Krejtz is an associate professor of psychology at SWPS University in Warsaw, Poland, where he is leading the Eye Tracking Research Center. He has extensive experience in social and cognitive psychology research methods and statistics. In his research, he focuses on the use of eye tracking method and developing a second-order eye data-based metrics that may capture the dynamics of attention and information processing processes (transitions matrices entropy, ambient-focal coefficient K), dynamics of attention process in the context of Human-Computer Interaction, multimedia learning, media user experience, and accessibility.