This study used cognitive semantics to initiate a narrative dialogue in secondary school classrooms. It focused on examining empirical relationships between exercises, such as 'exegetical reading', 'mystery' and 'concepts to work with' and students' learning -- their acquisition and application of the religious concept of 'image of God' outlined…

Previous research suggests that learning from combined textual and pictorial representations is generally more effective than from text alone. However, when these elements are spatially separated, learners must mentally integrate them, increasing cognitive load. According to cognitive load theory, such split-attention formats are less effective…

Inference-making is a central element of successful reading comprehension, yet provides a challenge for beginning readers. Text decoding takes up cognitive resources which prevents beginning readers from successful inference-making and compromises reading comprehension. Listening does not require any decoding and could therefore offer a less…

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…

This study investigated whether presenting a picture before reading can encourage situation-model construction. We compared two conditions (n = 30) which differed in whether a picture of the initial situation described in a narrative text was presented before reading (i.e. pictorial-support condition) or not (i.e. no-picture condition).…

In the present study the construct inquiry of mind explored and an instrument to measure it is proposed. Using three different samples, explorative and confirmative factor analyses were performed, resulting in three empirical dimensions that correspond to the three theoretical dimensions: 1) 'value deep understanding,' 2) 'reserve judgment and…

It is well established that the comprehension of spoken words referring to object concepts relies on high-level visual areas in the ventral stream that build increasingly abstract representations. It is much less clear whether basic low-level visual representations are also involved. Here we asked in what task situations low-level visual…

The mental lexicon plays a central role in reading comprehension (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). It encompasses the number of lexical entries in spoken and written language (vocabulary breadth), the semantic quality of these entries (vocabulary depth), and the connection strength between lexical representations (semantic relatedness); as such, it…

This functional magnetic resonance imaging study examined the neural correlates of coherence-break detection during reading in the context of a contradiction paradigm. Young adults (N = 31, ages 19-27) read short narratives (half contained a break in coherence) that were presented sentence by sentence in a self-paced, slow event-related design.…

Embodied theories of language comprehension propose that readers construct a mental simulation of described objects that contains perceptual characteristics of their real-world referents. The present study is the first to investigate directly whether implied object size is mentally simulated during sentence comprehension and to study the potential…

Many young readers fail to construct a proper mental text representation, often due to a lack of higher-order skills such as making integrative and inferential links. In an eye-tracking experiment among 141 Dutch eighth graders, we tested whether coherence markers (moreover, after, because) improve students' online processing and their off-line…

Many recent studies have aimed to demonstrate that specific types of reading comprehension depend on different underlying cognitive abilities. In these studies, it is often implicitly assumed that reading comprehension is a multidimensional construct. The general aim of this study was to examine the dimensionality of a large pool of reading…

To understand what they read or hear, children and adults must create a coherent mental representation of presented information. Recent research suggests that the ability to do so starts to develop early--well before reading age--and that early individual differences are predictive of later reading-comprehension performance. In this paper, we…

In the present study, we explored why interspersing quantitative details through a multimedia lesson detracts from learners' qualitative understanding. Three experimental conditions were created. In each, participants had to study a qualitative text on the formation, propagation, and dispersion of ocean waves. In the concise condition no…

This study investigated the effects of K. J. Klauer's (1989) inductive reasoning training program of teaching children. Effects of training and the range of transfer of the training were assessed. The subjects were 34 third-grade Dutch children of average ability, matched on age, sex, and IQ. Children from the training condition (N=17) received…