The ability to form a mental model of a text is an essential component of successful reading comprehension (RC), and purpose for reading can influence mental model construction. Participants were assigned to one of two conditions during an RC test to alter their purpose for reading: concurrent (texts and questions were presented simultaneously)…

While learners' evaluations of author trustworthiness have received much attention in prior research, less work has examined how students evaluate information within texts or engage in critique. Specifically, in this exploratory study, we sought to determine how effective higher education students were at engaging in research report critique, a…

This study investigated multimodal multiple text comprehension (MMTC) among forty-eight Taiwanese university students, considering their cognitive and affective characteristics. A randomized trial with pre- and post-tests design was applied. The experiment group received a browser-embedded note-taking device along with epistemic prompting. The…

We investigated the association between thinking dispositions and two outcomes of multiple-texts comprehension: integration of conflicting information in argumentative essays; and recall of inferential information as an index of deep comprehension. We focused on two thinking dispositions, need for cognition (NFC) and actively open-minded thinking…

Sentence production and comprehension both draw on linguistic knowledge, but current research is unclear on whether these fundamental language tasks involve similar or distinct competitive processes. Previous studies suggest that production and comprehension may involve similar conflict resolution processes, but that production may additionally…

Reading comprehension is an incredibly complex, purposeful activity that involves simultaneous orchestration and integration of multiple processes. However, dominant perspectives suggest that two clusters of skills, word reading and language comprehension, account for successful reading. Such two-factor models are problematic because they do not…

This study investigates the effects of three word-focused exercise conditions on vocabulary learning. The exercises were developed based on the involvement load hypothesis. This study also explores how individual differences (e.g. second-language English proficiency level and working memory) affect vocabulary learning outcomes. A total of 180…

Misophonia refers to one's sensitivity to specific sounds, which can range from minor annoyance to extreme distress. This experiment tested the role of individual differences in misophonia sensitivity on learning. College students read a text passage about migraines in a quiet room with 2 or 3 other participants and 1 confederate. In some…

Successful text comprehension requires readers to engage in a number of coherence-building processes. This study examined how analyzing the cohesion of students 'constructed responses can be used to evaluate these coherence-building processes and the extent to which they vary across readers' individual differences and across types of texts. We…

Misinterpretations during language comprehension are common. The ability to recover from processing difficulties is therefore crucial for successful day-to-day communication. Previous research on the recovery from misinterpretations has focused on sentences containing syntactic ambiguities. The present study instead investigated the outcome of…

The inference mediation hypothesis (IMH) assumes that individual difference factors that affect reading proficiency have direct and indirect effects on comprehension outcomes, with the indirect effects involving inference processes. The present study tested the IMH in a diverse sample of two and four-year college students in a task that emphasizes…

The current work was conducted to better understand the influences of source presence and individual differences on evaluating and sharing information from multiple conflicting Internet texts about childhood vaccinations. The results indicate that college student readers appeared to be insensitive to a source availability manipulation. However,…

Comprehension substantially benefits from attending to, thinking about, and mentally representing the sources of any presented information. Such processes require mental effort and unfortunately people do not always engage in such activities. The current article presents a nascent, evolving model of discourse comprehension that formalizes…

Readers read for different purposes and the texts they read vary in topic and difficulty. These situational factors influence standards of coherence--how much understanding a reader aims to have for a given text. Three studies examined whether individual differences in reader-based standards of coherence influenced off-line and on-line…

In Troyer and Kutas (2018), individual differences in knowledge of the world of Harry Potter (HP) rapidly modulated individuals' average electrical brain potentials to contextually supported words in sentence endings. Using advances in single-trial electroencephalogram analysis, we examined whether this relationship is strictly a result of domain…