The aim of this paper is two-fold. The first aim is to review the core representational and processing aspects of influential accounts of single-document and multiple-document comprehension with a particular emphasis on how readers negotiate conflicting information during reading. This review provides the groundwork for the second aim--to expand…

The aim of this paper is two-fold. The first aim is to review the core representational and processing aspects of influential accounts of single-document and multiple-document comprehension with a particular emphasis on how readers negotiate conflicting information during reading. This review provides the groundwork for the second aim--to expand…

As readers move through a text, they engage in various types of processes that, if all goes well, result in a mental representation that captures their interpretation of the text. With each new text segment the reader engages in passive and, at times, reader-initiated processes. These processes are strongly influenced by the readers'…

This article proposes an integrated cognitive theory of reading and listening that draws on a maximalist account of comprehension and emphasizes the role of bottom-up and top-down processing. The theoretical framework draws on the findings of previous research and integrates them into a coherent and plausible narrative to explain and predict the…

Because many words of a language have more than one meaning, readers regularly need to disambiguate words during sentence comprehension. Using priming, eye-tracking, and event-related brain potentials, this thesis tested whether readers differently disambiguate words with semantically related meanings like "wire" and "cone,"…

An educational assessment embodies an argument from a handful of observations of what students say, do or make in a handful of particular circumstances, to what they know or can do in what kinds of situations more broadly. This article discusses ways in which research into the nature and development of expertise can help assessment designers…

To detail the structure and format of memory for texts, researchers have examined whether readers monitor separate text dimensions for space, time, and characters. The authors proposed that the interactivity between these individual dimensions may be as critical to the construction of complex mental models as the discrete dimensions themselves. In…

Readers construct at least 2 interrelated mental representations when they comprehend a text: a textbase and a situation model. Two experiments were conducted with recognition memory to examine how domain knowledge and text coherence influence readers' textbase and situation-model representations. In Experiment 1, participants made remember-know…

Illustrates use of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) for predicting coherence through reanalyzing two studies that manipulated coherence of texts and assessed readers' comprehension. Finds that LSA predicts effects of text coherence on comprehension. Notes that LSA can be applied as an automated method that produces coherence predictions similar to…