Abstract: Reading is an important cognitive activity in our daily life. Illustrations are usually used to facilitate the reading comprehension of the readers. Forty college students were sampled for this experiment. Using Eye View Monitoring Systems, this research examined the effects of two different levels of illustration-text relativeness (e.g. high vs. low) on the reading of two groups of the college students. One group was identified with the field dependence cognitive style, while the other was with the field independence cognitive style. The results indicated that: (1) the level of illustration-text relativeness demonstrated different effects on the reading of the two groups of the participants. No significant effect of the level of illustration-text relativeness was found on the reading of the participants with the field independence cognitive style, while corresponding significant effect was detected for the group with the field dependence cognitive style. Besides, the group with the field dependence cognitive style scored significant higher on the reading with high level of illustration-text relativeness than that with low level of illustration-text relativeness. (2) the participants with the field dependence cognitive style tended to actively adjust their focus of reading based on the level of the illustration-text relativeness. It is found that when the level of relativeness was high, these participants would focus more on the illustrations, while when the level was low, they would focus more on the texts instead. Besides, the average duration time for switching between the illustration and text as well as the attention on text was found to be longer for the participants with the field dependence cognitive style than for those with the field independence cognitive style. This study implied that high level of illustration-text relativeness could facilitate the reading comprehension of the readers with the field dependence cognitive style, who could actively adjust the objects to be processed when they read the materials with different levels of illustration-text relativeness.

Key words: level of illustration-text relativeness, cognitive style, reading, eye movement