Negative sentences are hard to process when they are presented out of context. When embedded in a context of plausible denial their processing difficulty decreases or is completely eliminated. We investigated in six behavioral experiments whether the processing of negation is eased in a denial context triggered by discourse markers (e.g.…

Two experiments explored the hypothesis that anaphors and demonstratives signal different procedural instructions: Whereas the anaphor "it" brings a concrete entity into a reader's focus, the demonstrative "this" directs the focus to a predicate proposition in a discourse representation. The findings from an online eye-tracking…

One problem with readability formulas is that they are generally calculated on factors at the sentence and subsentence level. However, the representation of text through information structures is equally important. The complexity of information structures and their realizations will affect reading difficulty and should be incorporated into…

A review of research reveals that, although several reading researchers recognize the significance of grammatical complexity beyond the sentence in reading comprehension, little research exists in this area of grammatical interrelationships among sentences. The first step toward an understanding of grammatical complexity beyond the sentence is for…

Comprehension is a process that occurs within the reader and is at least partially dependent on cohesion and coherence. The concept of cohesion is used to show how sentences which are structurally independent of one another may be linked together. Cohesion exists within a text and is not the same as coherence, which is something the reader…

Analysis of several texts simplified to teach reading comprehension to college second language students shows that simplification affects both textual cohesion and coherence. Moreover, simplification restricts the amount of significant semantic information and creates a more transparent pattern of reference. The use of cohesive conjunctions varies…