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Reading Time in the Wild: An Assessment of Readability Predictors Based on Naturally-Observed Reading Times

Reading time has surfaced as a viable proxy for readability and comprehension. However, most studies used reading times obtained in controlled experimental settings with eye-tracking or self-paced reading tasks, which differs from uncontrolled, more naturalistic reading behaviour in the wild. Through a collaboration with a newspaper, we have access to a dataset of Dutch news articles with corresponding clickstream reading times averaged across thousands of readers. To address the issue, we evaluate how well common proxies for readability and comprehension hold on data from online readers. We first group the proxies in four dimensions and compute the correlation between the proxies and the average reading time per token for each dimension. Then we assess if the proxies can meaningfully predict reading time per token. The results are surprising: we find no meaningful correlation between any proxy and the average reading time per token, nor can any proxy be used for reliable prediction. Additionally, we rerun the prediction on corresponding, automatically simplified texts and surprisingly find increased predicted reading times per token. These results imply that clickstream reading time must be considered with caution as a proxy for readability or comprehension.