Reading can be regarded as a combination of lexical decoding and linguistic comprehension (Hoover and Gough in Read Writ Interdiscip J 2:127-160, 1990). In Chinese sentence reading, skilled readers' difficulties in phonological processing significantly enhance the 'wrap-up' effect (Li and Lin in J Deaf Stud Deaf Educ 25(4):505-516, 2020). To…

The study of word-to-text integration (WTI) provides a window on incremental processes that link the meaning of a word to the preceding text. We review a research program using event-related potential indicators of WTI at sentence beginnings, thus localizing sources of integration to prior text meaning independently of the current sentence. The…

Knowing how to provide effective literacy instruction is important for all educators, but it is critically important for urban educators. This article is built on the assumption that deepening urban educators' understanding of the reading process will better equip them to facilitate students' reading development, and to diagnose and intervene if…

Several research articles published in the realm of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) have reported evidence of the benefits of multimodal annotations, i.e. the provision of pictorial as well as verbal clarifications, for vocabulary uptake from reading. Almost invariably, these publications account for the observed benefits with reference…

This paper is concerned with the reversal in meaning of the word "positivism", which has come to mean "theory which assumes the existence of a world beyond our ideas" whereas once it meant "theory which is agnostic about the existence of a world beyond our ideas", and with educational writers' persistent mistakes in using quotation marks, as a…

Learning from texts requires reflection on how far one has mastered the material. Learners use such metacognitive processes to decide whether to engage in deeper learning activities or not. This article examines how the lexical surface of specialist concepts influences their mental representation. Lexical encodings that are the concise wordings of…

This paper represents some suggestions towards discourse-analytic approaches for ESL/EFL education, with the focus on identifying the textual forms which can contribute to the textual difficulty. Textual difficulty/comprehensibility, rather than being purely text-based or reader-dependent, is certainly a matter of interaction between text and…

AutoTutor is a natural language tutoring system that has produced learning gains across multiple domains (e.g., computer literacy, physics, critical thinking). In this paper, we review the development, key research findings, and systems that have evolved from AutoTutor. First, the rationale for developing AutoTutor is outlined and the advantages…

AutoTutor is a natural language tutoring system that has produced learning gains across multiple domains (e.g., computer literacy, physics, critical thinking). In this paper, we review the development, key research findings, and systems that have evolved from AutoTutor. First, the rationale for developing AutoTutor is outlined and the advantages…

In this study we examined asymmetric semantic activation patterns as people listened to conversations and narratives that promoted causal inferences. Based on the hypothesis that understanding the unique features of conversational input may benefit from or require a modified pattern of conceptual activation during conversation, we compared…

Two related questions critical to understanding the predictive processes that come online during sentence comprehension are (1) what information is included in the representation created through prediction and (2) at what functional stage does top-down, predicted information begin to affect bottom-up word processing? We investigated these…

This research investigates the relationship among various processing behaviors and their link to comprehension. Thirty-four students from three fourth-grade classrooms orally read the first chapter of a short story. The reading was followed by an unaided recall and probes by the researcher. Each clause as finally read was evaluated for semantics…

Reading-specific and general color-shape cognitive flexibility were assessed in 68 first and second graders to examine: 1) the development of graphophonological-semantic cognitive flexibility (the ability to process concurrently phonological and semantic aspects of print) in comparison to color-shape cognitive flexibility, 2) the contribution of…

The present study examined how proofreading and reading-for-comprehension instructions influence eye movements during reading. Thirty-seven participants silently read sentences containing compound words as target words while their eye movements were being recorded. We manipulated word length and frequency to examine how task instructions influence…

This project examined the words selected for instruction from fourth-grade English/Language Arts (ELA) and science programs with the goal of describing the unique words in these two text types. Seven features of the words were established: (a) length, (b) frequency, (c) frequency of a word's morphological family, (d) familiarity, (e) dispersion…