Despite substantive work on the cognitive processes underlying comprehension, little research has examined the "phenomenological" nature of reading. We investigated how readers' experiences of visual and verbal thought related to their transportation into the narrative text and whether these were influenced by perspective-taking.…

In Simon-type interference tasks, participants are asked to perform a 2-choice reaction on a stimulus dimension while ignoring the stimulus position. Commonly, robust congruency effects are found; that is, reactions are faster when the relevant stimulus attribute and the assigned response match the location of the stimulus. Simon congruency…

Emotion effects in reading have typically been investigated by manipulating words' emotional valence and arousal in lexical decision. The standard finding is that valence and arousal can have both facilitatory and inhibitory effects, which is hard to reconcile with current theories of emotion processing in reading. Here, we contrasted these…

The effects of properties of words on their reading aloud response times (RTs) are 1 major source of evidence about the reading process. The precision with which such RTs could potentially be predicted by word properties is critical to evaluate our understanding of reading but is often underestimated due to contamination from individual…

Many explanations of the difficulties associated with interpreting object relative clauses appeal to the demands that object relatives make on working memory. MacDonald and Christiansen [MacDonald, M. C., & Christiansen, M. H. (2002). "Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996)." "Psychological…

The present study investigates the relation between spatial ability and visuo-spatial and verbal working memory in spatial text processing. In two experiments, participants listened to a spatial text (Experiments 1 and 2) and a non-spatial text (Experiment 1), at the same time performing a spatial or a verbal concurrent task, or no secondary task.…

To examine metacomprehension during comprehension, undergraduates (n = 133) were asked to provide descriptions of how they determined the meaning of four rare words presented in short passages. Content analysis of these written descriptions revealed task-specific metacomprehension reflecting lexical, textbase, and situation model processes.…

Relations between rank of propositions in descriptive passages, importance ratings, and recall were evaluated in experiments using undergraduates to determine whether passage structure and importance ratings are necessarily related. Importance ratings varied with instructions, but subjects recalled superordinate propositions better than…

Individual differences in working memory capacity affect the probability of resolving apparent inconsistencies in sentences. Resolution was less likely for readers with small working memories. Such readers devote so many resources to reading processes that they have less capacity for retaining earlier verbatim wording in working memory. (Author/RD)

This three-part book, a collection of articles by some of the foremost researchers in language comprehension, examines the thought processes involved in listening to conversation or in reading a page of text. The first part of the book deals with what the reader stores from a page during and after comprehension; it investigates the reader's use of…

Reading is a subject about which many people have opinions. Therefore it is necessary for those in the field to determine a perspective through which to examine issues. Such a perspective implies recognizing diverse theories about educational processes and human development and analyzing them, creating a balance among the cognitive and emotional…

This study is an attempt to identify one source of individual differences in the extent to which readers learn from text and the means for accommodating it. Eighty college students were administered a series of aptitude tests and randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups. The subjects then received six passages, each passage followed by a…

One hundred twelve college students participated in a study designed to determine whether students differ in their relative employment of knowledge-based processes in discourse processing and whether individuals tend to be more "text-bound" and less able to use preexisting knowledge schemata when they are more "stimulus-bound"…

Arguing that skilled reading is the result of the successful acquisition of a number of highly automatic component processes that operate together in an integrated manner, this paper describes a series of studies of good and poor high school readers representing three general domains of processing: decoding, analyzing and comprehending text, and…