Purpose: To understand complex expository text, readers often engage in metacognitive comprehension monitoring. Metacognitive monitoring is assumed to rely on basic cognitive abilities (working memory updating, short-term memory, verbal intelligence). These abilities decrease in later adulthood. We thus compared younger and older adults in their…

Much research has explored the intersection of music and language but has mostly focused on first language (L1) acquisition in early childhood. The few studies on second language (L2) learning and music have mainly concentrated on listening and speaking skills. Therefore, this study aims to address this gap by investigating how music perception…

Purpose: Lexical processing impairments such as delayed and reduced activation of lexical-semantic information have been linked to syntactic processing disruptions and sentence comprehension deficits in individuals with aphasia (IWAs). Lexical-level deficits can also preclude successful lexical encoding during sentence processing and amplify the…

Mind wandering occurs when a reader's thoughts are unrelated to the text's ideas. We examined the relation between mind wandering and readers' memory for text. More specifically, we assessed whether mind wandering inhibits the reader's development of the situation model and thus their ability to identify and recall the text's most central ideas.…

This study explored the relations between reading comprehension and two memory capacities, short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM), for adults who read between the third and eighth grade levels. With a sample of 407 adults from two countries, we computed correlations among measures and conducted hierarchical regression and commonality…

This study explored the relations between reading comprehension and two memory capacities, short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM), for adults who read between the third and eighth grade levels. With a sample of 407 adults from two countries, we computed correlations among measures and conducted hierarchical regression and commonality…

Little is known about conceptual integration processes and their contributions to memory representations that are constructed in sentence comprehension among adults with underdeveloped literacy skills. We measured word-by-word reading time to examine variation of responsiveness to demands of lexical and conceptual processing during sentence…

Individual differences in reading skill have frequently been related to variability in working memory capacity; however, it is unclear what drives this relation. The present study investigated two attentional control mechanisms that may contribute to this relation: proactive control and online filtering. To examine how the neural mechanisms of…

Taken together, the Coherence Principle of Multimedia Learning Theory and the Integrated Systems Hypothesis propose that co-occurring and semantically congruent verbal and visual information should be integrated into one mental representation that enhances memory. The purpose of this paper was to examine how learning pseudowords with matching…

We investigated the contribution of morphological awareness to university students' reading comprehension ability. Although there is considerable evidence that morphological awareness contributes to children's reading ability, there is much less evidence concerning adults; the few studies of adults have not controlled other known predictors of…

There have been many studies exploring the advantages that bilingualism confers to individuals' working memory and metacognition (see Ransdell, 2006; Del Missier et al., 2010). The hypothesis of language critical period states that if no language learning and teaching happen during the critical period, an individual will never be able to fully…

Emotional inferences are conclusions that a reader draws about the emotional state of a story's protagonist. In this study, we examined whether children and adults draw emotional inferences while reading short stories or listening to an aural presentation of short stories. We used an online method that assesses inferences during reading with a…

In this chapter, we examine adult- and child-focused models of reading with respect to cognitive processing deficits associated with low literacy. We examine influential integrative models of reading and reading comprehension. We then review the empirical literature on components of reading ability, subdivided into three categories: language…

We examined the relationship between two metalinguistic tasks: prosodic awareness and punctuation ability. Specifically, we investigated whether adults' ability to punctuate was related to the degree to which they are aware of and able to manipulate prosody in spoken language. English-speaking adult readers (n = 115) were administered a receptive…

The aim of this study was to examine predictions derived from a proposal about the relation between word-decoding skill and working memory capacity, called verbal efficiency theory. The theory states that poor word representations and slow decoding processes consume resources in working memory that would otherwise be used to execute high-level…