Background: Research shows that providing readers with a title prior to reading a passage increases comprehension compared with reading a passage without a title. However, the specific type of comprehension that is facilitated by the presence of a title and how this relates to reading time has not been examined. We present three experiments in…

Background: Commercial speed-reading training programs are typically marketed with the promise to dramatically increase reading speed without impairing comprehension. From the perspective of reading psychology, it seems quite unlikely that speed-reading training can indeed have such effects. However, research on the effectiveness of modern…

Background: Multitasking while reading is a commonplace activity. Many studies have been conducted examining the effect of multitasking on reading comprehension and times. The purpose of this meta-analysis is to consolidate the empirical findings on reading comprehension and times in order to understand the overall effect of multitasking on…

Aims: Speed reading is advertised as a way to increase reading speed without any loss in comprehension. However, research on speed reading has indicated that comprehension suffers as reading speed increases. We were specifically interested in how processes of inference generation were affected by speed reading. Methods: We examined how reading…

Background: The digitalisation of literature is proliferating, and the increasing spread of digital reading devices and the availability of digital texts is likely to make "books on screen" a lasting phenomenon, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of digitalisation for the experience of narrative fiction. While on the…

Background: Advances in natural language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics have facilitated major improvements on traditional readability formulas that aim at predicting the overall difficulty of a text. Recent studies have identified several types of linguistic features that are theoretically motivated and predictive of human…

This study investigated the relationships among vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, reading comprehension, and reading rate among college-aged students. While the relationships of some of these variables have been explored in previous research, the current study's focus on the role of vocabulary depth on the literacy measures within a sample of…

This study shows that it makes a difference whether accuracy measures or rate measures are used when assessing reading comprehension. When the outcome is reading comprehension accuracy (i.e., the number of correct responses), word reading skills (measured as access to orthographic representations) account for a modest amount of the variance in the…

The study examined the role of oral language skills in reading comprehension and listening comprehension levels of 125 monolingual (L1) and bilingual (L2) English-speaking learners (M = 121.5 months, SD = 4.65) in England. All testing was conducted in English. The L1 learners outperformed their L2 peers on the measures of oral language and text…

The importance of prosodic elements is recognised in most definitions of fluency. Although speed and accuracy have been typically considered the constituents of reading fluency, prosody is emerging as an additional component. The relevance of prosody in comprehension is increasingly recognised in the latest studies. The purpose of this research is…

Previous research indicates that removing initial strokes from Chinese characters makes them harder to read than removing final or internal ones. In the present study, we examined the contribution of important components to character configuration via singular value decomposition. The results indicated that when the least important segments, which…

The aim of this follow-up study was to examine the progress made by 13 Greek-speaking precocious readers in phonological awareness, reading and spelling from the fourth to sixth grades of primary education, and to compare their progress with that of 11 nonprecocious reader classmates. It was hypothesised that because of the linguistic…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of impaired reading skills and visual discomfort on the reading rate and comprehension of university students when reading texts presented at a high school (Grade 9) or university (Grade 12) level of difficulty. Groups included impaired readers (n = 18) and normal readers with (n = 13) or…

This study examined the development of rapid automatised naming (RAN) components (i.e. articulation time and pause time) in English and Chinese, and their relations to English reading comprehension, in Chinese English immersion students at Grades 2, 4 and 6. Results indicated that pause time rather than articulation time was highly correlated with…

We present four studies indicating that the size and design of the typeface in textual material for children aged 7-9 may impair speed of reading and comprehension, and measurement of reading attainment. The first study compared the speed with which sample sentences were comprehended. The sentences were printed in Arial font with an x-height of…