Literacy is a critically important and contemporary issue for educators, scientists, and politicians. Efforts to overcome the challenges associated with illiteracy, and the subsequent development of literate societies, are closely related to those of poverty reduction and sustainable human development. In this paper, the authors examine literacy…

We reintroduce a wide-angle view of reading comprehension, the Reading Systems Framework, which places word knowledge in the center of the picture, taking into account the progress made in comprehension research and theory. Within this framework, word-to-text integration processes can serve as a model for the study of local comprehension…

According to theories of embodied cognition, a critical element in language comprehension is the formation of sensorimotor simulations of the actions and events described in a text. Although much of the embodied cognition research has focused on simulations of motor actions, we ask whether readers form simulations of story characters' linguistic…

This article reviews the role of relevance in text processing. It argues that relevance instructions provided by instructors and texts help readers identify text segments that are germane to a reading goal. A taxonomy of relevance instructions is presented and four basic types of relevance manipulations are considered (i.e., targeted segments,…

This study investigated whether structured or unstructured questioning strategies, combined with two levels of domain knowledge and text coherence, significantly affect text memory and text learning. Results of this study suggest that high domain knowledge and structured questioning strategies are the most reliable predictors of text memory and…

An adult developmental model of self-regulated language processing (SRLP) is introduced, in which the allocation policy with which a reader engages text is driven by declines in processing capacity, growth in knowledge-based processes, and age-related shifts in reading goals. Evidence is presented to show that the individual reader's allocation…

In this article, the authors examined readers' sensitivity to the match between characters' goals and characters' actions. In Experiment 1, readers integrated actions consistent with characters' goals more easily when there was a match between the extremeness of the actions and the urgency of the goals. In Experiments 2 and 3, characters'…

Investigates the effect of vowels on reading accuracy in Arabic orthography. Finds that vowels had a significant effect on reading accuracy of poor and skilled readers in reading each of four kinds of texts. (NH)

Most studies of eye movement behavior during reading have dealt with the processes involved with local aspects of text, such as visual or graphic characteristics or individual word features. To determine if a global level of processing (pertaining to the whole text or to large sections of it) would affect eye movement patterns differently, a study…

Studies how children negotiate the meaning of literature by examining how they responded when given the opportunity to retell a story directly after hearing it. (DF)

A study investigated how two text-based factors, word relationships and surface syntactic structure, interact with readers' ability to analyze the semantic relationships and make inferences based on those analyses. In each passage, the influence of word relationships was assessed by manipulating the degree of semantic entailment between two words…

A study investigated how text features influence the amount of vocabulary knowledge students acquired incidentally while reading expositions. Three sets of text features were identified from studies on comprehension: (1) features associated with the macrostructure, (2) features associated with logical and temporal relations in the microstructure,…

Prompted by the growing interest in the role of reader-related and text-related variables in reading comprehension, a study compared 30 sixth grade students in regular classrooms to 30 language impaired students. The purpose was to assess the relationship of (1) text structure manipulations for simple and complex sentence structure, (2) discourse…

In order to investigate the text structure/reading comprehension relationship, this paper reviews recent research on text representation theories. Text structure investigation--research on semantic memory as it is concerned with meaning from the word level through the inference level--follows the premise that sentences are understood in the…

A group of elementary teachers enrolled in a graduate class in language arts at the University of North Dakota explored how children construct their own meanings as they interact with texts. One teacher regularly read to her 20-month-old grandson, and excerpts from the journal she kept reveal that his understanding of a specific text evolved to…