As an important construct in the cognitive process, comprehension monitoring has received much scholarly attention. Researchers have recognized comprehension monitoring as an ability closely linked with children's reading comprehension ability and working memory capacity. Evidence is also abundant to prove that comprehension monitoring skill…

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)…

The tantalizing prospects of learning benefits from multimodal conditions on second language (L2) learning in general, and L2 vocabulary development in particular, have important implications. Indeed, opening a language learning app on any device provides the immediate experience of simultaneous input modalities, and a wide range of input types.…

Multimodal input can significantly support second language (L2) vocabulary learning and comprehension. However, very little research has examined how L2 learners, especially young learners, allocate attention when exposed to such input and whether learning from multimodal input can be explained by attention allocation. This study therefore…

Background: Executive function (EF) plays a crucial role in children's reading. However, previous studies were based on offline products of reading comprehension. Online research is needed to reveal the core mechanisms underlying children's reading processing. By measuring children's working memory (WM) and cognitive flexibility (CF), we…

The authors examined how information relevance affects readers' understanding of conflicting information in multiple documents and how relevance affects the processing of conflicting information on a moment-by-moment level. Sixty-four undergraduate students read a set of documents about a medical topic containing three intertextual conflicts…

Mind maps are often used to help readers process texts, but their effectiveness is empirically under-investigated. This study explores whether the use of mind maps presented either before or after the text can prime successful selective processing strategies related to the text topic structure. Differences in performance outcomes (i.e., memory and…

Eye tracking and event-related potentials (ERPs) have complementary advantages in the study of reading processes. We used eye tracking to extend ERP evidence of Helder et al. (2020) that word-to-text integration at the beginnings and ends of sentences is primarily determined by local text factors (antecedents in a previous sentence) but that…

Purpose: The Motor Planning Theory of Prosody and reading prosody research indicate that "out of the blue" oral reading, as practiced in clinical and research settings, invokes surface rather than covert prosody, particularly when readers are recorded, less skilled, and/or speech impaired. Warm-up is not considered in passage reading for…

Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are typically processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs), but this difference is diminished by an inanimate head-noun in semantically non-reversible ORCs ("The book that the boy is reading"). In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the influence of animacy on online processing of…

Background: During digital reading on internet-connected devices, students may be exposed to a variety of on-screen distractions. Learning by reading can therefore become a fragmented experience with potentially negative consequences for reading processes and outcomes. Objectives: This study investigated the effects of on-screen distractions, as…

To build a coherent accurate mental representation of a text, readers routinely validate information they read against the preceding text and their background knowledge. It is clear that both sources affect processing, but "when" and "how" they exert their influence remains unclear. To examine the time course and cognitive…

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…

Background: Of the myriad of reading comprehension (RC) assessments used in schools, multiple-choice (MC) questions continue to be one of the most prevalent formats used by educators and researchers. Outcomes from RC assessments dictate many critical factors encountered during a student's academic career, and it is crucial that we gain a deeper…

Previous research has generally focused on understanding individual variation in either on-line processing or off-line comprehension even though some theories explicitly link difficulty in processing to comprehension problems. The goal of the current study was to examine individual variation in performance both during on-line and off-line reading…