We segment what we read into meaningful events, each separated by a discrete boundary. How does event segmentation during encoding relate to the structure of story information in long-term memory? To evaluate this question, participants read stories of fictional historical events and then engaged in a postreading verb arrangement task. In this…

The current study examined whether readers encode the thoughts of story characters. Participants read narratives in which characters were described as either needing or not needing to remember a list of words. Across several experiments readers recalled more words in a free recall task when the story character was described as making an effort 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…

Compelling and interesting introductions are considered an important way of fostering reader engagement with expository-text content. But only a handful of projects have examined this prescriptive advice. In three experiments, we examined the effects of two different genres of introductions--narrative and expository--on comprehension and memory…

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…

This study investigated the effects of task relevance instructions and topic beliefs on reading processes and memory for belief-related text. Undergraduates received task instructions (focus on arguments for vs. against) before reading a dual-position text. In Experiment 1 (n = 88), a reading time methodology showed no differences in reading time…

We examine students' processing and representation of arguments and counterarguments in one-sided scientific texts. In Experiment 1, students read texts about evolution and TV violence. Sentence reading times indicated that subjects slowed down reading to the extent that arguments were both more consistent, and inconsistent, with the text…

This work examined how adjunct displays influence college readers' moment-by-moment processing of text and the products of reading, using reading time (Experiments 1 & 2), and think-aloud methodologies (Experiment 3). Participants did or did not study a diagram before reading a text. Overall, the reading time data, think-aloud data, and recall…

This study examines the effect of incentives, a motivational manipulation, on cognitive processes of reading. Extrinsic motivation was manipulated through the use of monetary incentives to assess its effect on information processing in reading. One group of college students was paid for what they remembered from several narrative passages they…

In this article, we discuss 2 issues that we believe any theory of discourse comprehension has to take account of-accessing irrelevant information and granularity. Along the lines that have been suggested as demonstrating the memory-based account, we describe some work in favor of the recruitment of apparently irrelevant information from memory…