Narratives often provide readers with opportunities to encode their preferences for particular outcomes. Our project examines some origins of such outcome preferences. For example, past literature suggests that readers tend to prefer positive outcomes for "good" characters and negative outcomes for "bad" characters. To extend…

The present study investigates the relation between spatial ability and visuo-spatial and verbal working memory in spatial text processing. In two experiments, participants listened to a spatial text (Experiments 1 and 2) and a non-spatial text (Experiment 1), at the same time performing a spatial or a verbal concurrent task, or no secondary task.…

We used Barton and Sanford's (1993) anomaly detection task to investigate text processing differences between skilled and less-skilled readers. The results of 2 experiments showed that many readers had the tendency to process text in a shallow or incomplete manner, frequently failing to detect anomalous nouns or noun phrases (NPs) in text such as…

Eye fixations were assessed during the reading of continuation sentences confirming inferences suggested by a preceding context sentence. In multiple regression analysis, individual differences in available prior vocabulary knowledge, working memory span, and speed of access to prior word knowledge served as predictors of eye fixations.…

Nassaji and Geva (1999) concluded that lower level processes, particularly efficiency in phonological and orthographic processing contributed significantly to individual differences in adult ESL reading. Moreover, they reported that speed of letter naming, while not directly associated with reading comprehension, was related to linguistic…

This paper argues that literature-centered reading programs, based on the perspective that reading is the process of bringing meaning to print, are in the best interest of the language minority students in the nation's elementary schools. After a review of basal reading systems and language-centered reading programs, the paper describes the…