We conducted a broad-coverage investigation of the effects of syntactic distance and word order on language processing against a dependency-annotated reading time corpus of English. A combined method of quantitative syntax and psycholinguistic analyses was adopted to yield converging evidence. It was found that (i) head-initial structures allow…

Studies investigating individual differences in reading ability often involve data sets containing a large number of collinear predictors and a small number of observations. In this article, we discuss the method of Random Forests and demonstrate its suitability for addressing the statistical concerns raised by such data sets. The method is…

Based on the idea that mastery of reading is a complex problem to be solved by a child, the author discusses the learning-to-read process as a series of discoveries of solutions to subproblems, all of which are then ordered into a total system. As a child's attempted solutions approximate more closely the reality of each aspect of the reading…

It is difficult to account for the real and easily measured differences in verbal competence. Differential psychologists investigate basic traits from which observed behavior is thought to be generated, but if thinking is viewed as a problem in information handling, research will more profitably focus on the relationship between behavior in…

Three experiments, in which subjects read passages of variable readability, measured "cognitive capacity usage" (the attention level to reading material) by recording by subjects reaction times in a secondary task (responding to a "click"). The data indicated that the easy texts filled cognitive capacity more completely than the difficult texts,…