Louise Rosenblatt's well-known concept of stance distinguishes between efferent reading (reading to take something away from the text) and aesthetic reading (reading for the experience of dwelling in the text). This article proposes a refinement to this binary, adding the concept of afferent reading. Afference, in biology, means a bringing-to, and…

Recent research on the use of eye movements to predict performance on reading comprehension tasks suggests that while eye movements may be used to measure comprehension, the relationship between eye-movement behavior and comprehension is influenced by differences in task demands between comprehension measures. In this study, we examined the…

Background: Internet documents are characterised by their non-linear hyperlink structure, which allows for more flexible reading, at the cost of higher cognitive loads. Linear text reading comprehension skills contribute to hypertext comprehension (either directly or through its impact on navigation behaviours) but cannot fully account for its…

The importance of oral language skills in reading comprehension is widely recognized in contemporary models. Building on this foundation, we propose the Linguistic Pathways Model. In this model, we illuminate mechanistic and developmental detail by which individual components of oral language support reading comprehension and embrace the multiple…

Understanding subject-specific texts requires interpreting representations--words, symbols, and images--in their intended senses. Many such representations are ambiguous, with meanings that shift depending on context and disciplinary conventions. This applies not only to words, for example, 'paper' in everyday versus academic usage, but also to…

Cognitive-informed reading education research utilises models that are underpinned by the notion that reading is a mental process of word recognition multiplied by language comprehension. Examples of these models include the Simple View of Reading, the Cognitive Foundations Framework, the Reading Rope and the Active Model of Reading. These models…

The current set of experiments was designed to explore the processing of spatial information during reading, specifically the "spatial-shift" effect and the "spatial-gradient" effect. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that when participants were presented with text alone (i.e., without prior map memorization, virtual…

Comprehension of expository texts is an important prerequisite for self-regulated learning. Processes of passive validation and metacognitive monitoring are thought to be involved in building a coherent situation model of a text. Inconsistency tasks are often used to measure these processes. Several studies have shown longer reading times for…

Filler-gap dependency resolution is often characterized as an active process. We probed the mechanisms that determine where and why comprehenders posit gaps during incremental processing using Norwegian as our test language. First, we investigated why active filler-gap dependency resolution is suspended inside "island" domains like…

A referential metaphor is a cohesive tie between lexical items that are metaphorically related, (e.g. "'The seagull' took the bread from the coffee table. No one heard the 'thief'"). The reference from "the thief" back to "the seagull" is metaphorical because thieves are human. The present article presents arguments…

Purpose: Many PhD students have strong reading comprehension, but some struggle with how to read critically. The purpose of this study is to understand what reading looks like for PhD students, what they are doing when they read scholarly texts and how they bring these texts to life in meaningful ways. Design/methodology/approach: The authors…

When displaying text on a page or a screen, only a finite number of characters can be presented on a single line. If the text exceeds that finite value, then text wrapping occurs. Often this process results in longer, more difficult to process words being positioned at the start of a line. We conducted an eye movement study to examine how this…

Studies have found that metacomprehension accuracy tends to be poor, but there has also been evidence that rereading a text may improve metacomprehension accuracy. One explanation for this rereading effect is that readers can attend more to the metacognitive level during rereading than the initial reading. However, prior experiments used paradigms…

Background: The idea that screens 'stole children's focus' and that reading books, in contrast, stimulates selective attention is theoretically complex and has largely been ignored in empirical tests. Research has identified positive associations between reading habits and various dimensions of attention in children, but most research is…

The present study examined how argument type (science based vs. personal case based), belief consistency (belief consistent vs. inconsistent) and reading goals (read to evaluate vs. read to learn) influence comprehension and trustworthiness evaluations for claim-conflicting multiple texts. Undergraduates read four conflicting texts about the…