Readers often prioritize processing and comprehension of information perceived as relevant to a particular intention. Using a repeated-measurement study, we investigated how readers' prior beliefs and external reading perspectives influence processing and comprehension of belief-relevant texts on two socioscientific controversies. University…

We examined genre-specific reading strategies for literary texts and hypothesized that text categorization (literary prose vs. poetry) modulates both how readers gather information from a text (eye movements) and how they realize its phonetic surface form (speech production). We recorded eye movements and speech while college students (N = 32)…

In the present article, we examined the effect of the reading medium and the reading time-frame on text processing, metacognitive monitoring of comprehension, and comprehension outcomes. The eye movements of 116 undergraduates were recorded while they read three texts in print and three texts on a tablet under self-paced reading time or under time…

This study examined the relationship between refutation texts and attention allocation by focusing on the interaction between important reader-and-text characteristics. Specifically, the authors investigated how prior knowledge and text-based interest affect attention allocation on refutation/control statements, topic, and explanatory and…

In this study participants read plausible and implausible sentences containing concessive and causal relations in Chinese, for instance, "[Although/Because] he has a talent for language, he [doesn't like/likes] learning English." In two self-paced reading experiments (Experiments 1 and 2), we consistently found the plausibility effect at…

To build a coherent accurate mental representation of a text, readers routinely validate information they read against the preceding text and their background knowledge. It is clear that both sources affect processing, but "when" and "how" they exert their influence remains unclear. To examine the time course and cognitive…

It has been argued that people construct situation models during text reception and that these are analogous, multimodal representations of text grounded in perception and action. On the one hand, abundant evidence has been generated that recipients perceptually simulate features of the situation described in the text. On the other hand, findings…

In the present study we examined whether overlap in language across texts influences the integration of information into a coherent discourse representation for bilingual readers. Across two experiments highly proficient Spanish--English bilinguals read pairs of expository passages describing two fictional science facts while their eye-movements…

We propose that machine-learned computational models (MLCMs), in which the model parameters and perhaps even structure are learned from data, can complement extant approaches to the study of text and discourse. Such models are particularly useful when theoretical understanding is insufficient, when the data are rife with nonlinearities and…

Most research in psycholinguistics relies on online measures such as reading time to inform and test theories of language comprehension. However, the value of offline measures such as question-answering performance is sometimes overlooked in sentence processing work. Consequently, psycholinguists do not yet understand how the tasks and measures…

This study investigates the influence of causal and concessive relations on discourse coherence in Chinese by means of eye movement and self-paced reading techniques. We use the sentential structure like "NP[subscript HUMAN] moved from place A to place B, {because ([Chinese characters omitted] yinwei) /although ([Chinese characters omitted]…

The research reported here addresses the status of the unselected meaning of a lexically ambiguous word in developing the larger meaning of the text by independently manipulating lexical and discourse-level variables in the text. In a series of 3 eye-movement experiments, participants read passages that contained 2 occurrences of an ambiguous…

Eye tracking was used to explore the role of grammatical aspect and world knowledge in establishing temporal relationships across sentences in discourse. Younger and older adult participants read short passages that included sentences such as "Mrs. Adams was knitting/knitted a new sweater"..."She wore her new garment...".…

Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of various constraints on the processing of jokes. Participants read humorous jokes and nonhumorous alternatives of the jokes, which were presented in 3 conditions that manipulated discourse context (comedy, political, and control). In Experiment 1, participants rated the funniness of texts and…

In this study, 36 participants read an expository text describing 4 rare illnesses from a given perspective. Their eye movements were recorded during reading, and think-alouds were probed after 10 relevant and 10 irrelevant sentences. A free recall was collected after reading. The results showed that in addition to increasing the fixation time…