This article provides a commentary within the special issue, Integration: The Keystone of Comprehension. According to most contemporary frameworks, a driving force in comprehension is the reader's ability to generate the links among the words and sentences (ideas) in the texts and between the ideas in the text and what the readers already know. As…

Due to the increasing educational use of the Internet, children in elementary school need to critically evaluate source information to judge the trustworthiness of information. Studies with adult readers show that sourcing prompts and mutually exclusive claims in reading materials promote the use of source information. However, little is known…

The spread of digital technology has prompted an increase in the amount of written text that gets produced and disseminated daily, together with a diversification of reading contexts and purposes. In this article, we propose that modern reading increasingly relies on readers' ability to set up and manage their own reading goals and decisions. We…

This study investigates the influence of causal and concessive relations on discourse coherence in Chinese by means of eye movement and self-paced reading techniques. We use the sentential structure like "NP[subscript HUMAN] moved from place A to place B, {because ([Chinese characters omitted] yinwei) /although ([Chinese characters omitted]…

One of the major aims of discourse-processing literature is to understand whether and when readers form discourse-level representations online. To test this, two word-by-word, self-paced reading experiments investigated the time course of integrating incoming information about the protagonist into the unfolding discourse-level representation in…

This study assessed the relative contribution of situational and memory-based influences to the reader's monitoring of complex narrative goal structures. In 2 experiments, people read stories according to which 2 collaborative subgoals had to succeed for a main goal to be achieved. At a story target region describing an attempt on the main goal,…