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…

The coherence threshold marks the point at which a reader has gained a sufficient comprehension level to move on in a text. Previous research has demonstrated that the readers' coherence threshold can be manipulated by increasing or decreasing task demands. The present experiments examined a manipulation of the coherence threshold within the text…

In this study we investigated whether the beneficial effect of adding illustrations to text can be explained by the fact that illustrations facilitate analogous mental representation construction from text in visuospatial working memory. For this the secondary task paradigm was used. It was expected that the secondary task interfered only with…

Readers are expected to construct balanced mental representations of socioscientific issues discussed across controversial documents. However, readers tend to be biased toward documents that present belief-consistent perspectives and tend to refute documents that argue against their stance (text-belief consistency effect). Published studies on…

Participants read a series of news articles, each containing a target event followed by 2 causes. To study the ease with which readers update their mental representation as they proceed through the text, the certainty of the first cause was manipulated: It was presented as either a certain explanation of the subsequent target event or as a…

There is general agreement that predictive inferences are activated when there is strong contextual support in the discourse model; however, there has been debate concerning the specificity of these inferences. In a series of 3 experiments, the specificity of context was manipulated to test the effects of contextual support on inference…

According to current theories in discourse research, readers monitor a series of 5 situational dimensions during narrative comprehension (Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). These dimensions are time (e.g., the order of events), space (e.g., locations), protagonist (e.g., main character actions), causality (e.g., how one…