Many digital reading applications have built-in features to control the presentation flow of texts by segmenting those texts into smaller linguistic units. Whether and how these segmentation techniques affect the readability of texts is largely unknown. With this background, the current study examined a recent proposal that a sentence-by-sentence…

Readers often struggle to identify the main ideas in expository texts. Existing research and instruction provide some guidance on how to encourage readers to identify main ideas. However, there is substantial variability in how main ideas are operationalized and how readers are prompted to identify main ideas. This variability hinders…

Readers often struggle to identify the main ideas in expository texts. Existing research and instruction provide some guidance on how to encourage readers to identify main ideas. However, there is substantial variability in how main ideas are operationalized and how readers are prompted to identify main ideas. This variability hinders…

Word boundary information is not marked explicitly in Chinese sentences and word ambiguity happens in Chinese texts. This introduces difficulty to parse characters into words when reading Chinese sentences, especially for beginning readers. In an eye-tracking study, we tested whether explicit word boundary information as provided by alternating…

It has been suggested that the preview benefit effect is actually a combination of preview benefit and preview costs. Marx et al. (2015) proposed that visually degrading the parafoveal preview reduces the costs associated with traditional parafoveal letter masks used in the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), thus leading to a more neutral baseline.…

Three experiments examined the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 students. In Experiment 1, homophone and spelling control errors were embedded in a story context and participants performed a proofreading task as they read for meaning. For both good and poor readers, more homophone errors went undetected than spelling…

The integration of knowledge during reading was tested in 1,109 secondary school students. Reading times for the second sentence in a pair (Jane's headache went away) were compared in conditions where the first sentence was either causally or temporally related to the first sentence (Jane took an aspirin vs. Jane looked for an aspirin).…

Purpose: This article addresses sentence comprehension as a requirement of reading comprehension within the framework of the narrow view of reading that was advocated in the prologue to this forum. The focus is on the comprehension requirements of complex sentences, which are characteristic of school texts. Method: Topics included in this…

The purpose of this study is to add to the knowledge of reading development by investigating reading processes from a neurocognitive and educational perspective. This study seeks to provide some insight about reading development for the neuroscience field. The goals of this study are to attain a clearer picture of reading development by using both…

Thai has its own distinctive alphabetic script with syllabic characteristics as it has implicit vowels for some consonants. Consonants are written in a linear order, but vowels can be written non-linearly above, below or to either side of the consonant. Of particular interest to the current study are that vowels can precede the consonant in…

Thirty-one third-grade students participated in an investigation of the possibility of training or improving intrasentence organizational skills in the context of a sentence anagram task. Sentence-anagram organizational training was conducted on an individual basis with the 16 students in the experimental group. A sentence-anagram posttest was…

Two experiments related inspection speed to text relevance. While specific goals or questions produced variable inspection speeds, a general purpose in reading did not. Text information related to reading goals was more likely to be retained. Results are explained in terms of storage demands imposed by each category of reading goal. (Author/RD)

Concludes that although sentence-long context did not facilitate the reading accuracy of primary grade children, the children did appear to be exploiting contextual information in their reading of sentences, with a relatively high proportion of reading errors being contextually acceptable. (FL)

The intent of this publication is to provide an opportunity for educators to consider reading comprehension as dependent, at least in part, on specific features of written language. Chapter 1 discusses a theoretical framework for thinking, problem solving, and reading comprehension. Chapter 2 deals with teaching word-level comprehension,…