Structural priming studies in production have demonstrated stronger priming effects for unexpected sentence structures (inverse preference effect). This is consistent with error-based implicit learning accounts that assume learning depends on prediction error. Such prediction error can be verb-specific, leading to strong priming when a verb that…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of sentence combining (SC) and sentence decombining (SD) activities on fostering reading comprehension. As a widely used writing activity for enhancing syntactic fluency in English Language Arts (ELA) classes, SC requires learners to combine short sentences into longer and more complex…

The results of a self-paced reading study with advanced German, Dutch and French second language (L2) learners of English showed that their online comprehension of early closure (EC) sentences which are initially misanalysed by native English speakers (e.g. "While John hunted the frightened rabbit escaped") was affected by whether or…

Negated words take longer to recognize than non-negated words following sentences with negation, suggesting that negated concepts are less active. The present experiments tested the possibility that this reduced activation would not persist beyond immediate testing. Experiment 1 used a probe task and materials similar to those used in previous…

This study concerns the mechanisms involving temporal update in discourse comprehension, comparing traditional approaches based on "Aktionsart" and Iconicity against an approach based on narrative expectations. Our experiments suggest that readers pay more attention to fine-grained discourse properties (such as salient temporal…

In a previous gaze-contingent boundary experiment, Angele and Rayner (2013) found that readers are likely to skip a word that appears to be the definite article "the" even when syntactic constraints do not allow for articles to occur in that position. In the present study, we investigated whether the word frequency of the preview of a…

Currently there is a general uncertainty about what makes collocations (i.e., fixed word combinations with specific, not easily interpreted relations between their components) hard for ESL learners to master, and about how to improve collocation recognition and learning process. This study explored and designed a comparative classification of…

In this study, we examined whether Chinese character structure influenced readers' saccadic targeting in Chinese reading. Readers' eye movements were recorded when they read single sentences containing one-character or two-character target words. Both the one-character words and the two constituent characters of two-character words either had a…

Recent research on negation has demonstrated that while readers are aware that this text construction is difficult, they seem to be able to do little to improve their comprehension. The present research evaluated whether a change in typeface could improve comprehension and metacomprehension of negation. Results indicated that while readers were…

English textbooks are widely used in every discipline in the majority of colleges and universities in Taiwan. To prepare college students for their future careers, it is necessary they be given systematic training and practice in reading these books. However, due to time constraints, most content teachers focus on the delivery of content rather…

In 2 experiments, the authors used an eye tracking while reading methodology to examine how different configurations of common noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases (NPs) influenced the difference in processing difficulty between sentences containing object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Results showed that processing difficulty was…

This study investigated factors that would affect a reader's understanding of the main idea at the global level and explicit and implicit main ideas at the local level. Fifty-seven first-year university students taking a college reading course took a comprehension test on an expository text. Statistical analyses revealed that text structure had a…

Seven experiments using self-paced reading and eyetracking suggest that omitting the middle verb in a double centre embedding leads to easier processing in English but leads to greater difficulty in German. One commonly accepted explanation for the English pattern--based on data from offline acceptability ratings and due to Gibson and Thomas…

The aim of this study is to optimize CALL environments as a learning tool rather than a gloss, focusing on the learning of polysemous words which refer to spatial relationship between objects. A lot of research has already been conducted to examine the efficacy of visual glosses while reading L2 texts and has reported that visual glosses can be…

This study aims at arousing college students' metacognition in detecting lexical cohesion during online text construction as WordNet served as a lexical resource. A total of 83 students were requested to construct texts through sequences of actions identified as interaction chains in this study. Interaction chains are grouped and categorized as a…