In a self-paced reading study, we investigated how effects of biasing contexts in idiom processing interact with effects of idiom literality. Specifically, we tested if idioms with a high potential for literal interpretation (e.g., "break the ice") are processed differently in figuratively and literally biasing contexts than idioms with…

The coherence threshold marks the point at which a reader has gained a sufficient comprehension level to move on in a text. Previous research has demonstrated that the readers' coherence threshold can be manipulated by increasing or decreasing task demands. The present experiments examined a manipulation of the coherence threshold within the text…

Using self-paced reading, the present study compared native English and adult L1-Korean-L2-English speakers' processing behaviors during online comprehension of underinformative scalar sentences and non-scalar sentences like "Some/All elephants have trunks and ears." Results indicate that native speakers showed online sensitivity (i.e.…

After reading, "few of the juniors were accepted," focus is on the students not accepted, the complement set. According to the Presupposition Denial Account, negative quantifiers, such as "few," convey a denial of expectation, or shortfall, which leads to complement set focus. In six experiments, we explored the role of the…

In contrast with languages where anaphors can be classified into pronouns and reflexives, Turkish has a tripartite system that consists of the anaphors "o", "kendi", and "kendisi". The syntactic literature on these anaphors has proposed that whereas "o" behaves like a pronoun and "kendi" behaves…

The RI-Val model of comprehension includes a validation process in which linkages formed by integration are matched against active memory. In five experiments, we investigated factors that influence validation. Reading times were measured on target sentences that contained either correct information or semantically related, but incorrect content.…

Children struggle with the resolution of pronouns during reading, but little is known about the sources of their difficulties. We conducted a longitudinal eye tracking experiment with 70 children in the final years of primary school. The children read sentences with a contextual resolution preference in which gender was either an informative…

This article addresses a current theoretical debate between the standard pragmatic model, the graded salience hypothesis, and the implicit display theory, by investigating the roles of the context and of the properties of the sarcastic utterance itself in the comprehension of a sarcastic remark. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted where we…

Recent research has shown contextual diversity (i.e., the number of passages in which a given word appears) to be a reliable predictor of word processing difficulty. It has also been demonstrated that word-frequency has little or no effect on word recognition speed when accounting for contextual diversity in isolated word processing tasks. An…

The present article examines the outcomes derived from a task on intensive reading carried out by university students. The main goal is to analyze the frequency of use and the success of idiom solving strategies used by the subjects while reading. Additionally, our interest is to compare the above outcomes and the reading time scores of a group of…

Research indicates that repeated reading improves students' reading fluency. Although found to be effective, the underlying reading processes impacted by the intervention remains unclear. Two theoretical rationales, automatic word processing and the contextual linguistic effect, explaining repeated reading's effectiveness have been advanced in the…

This study of the reading of text found that despite their lower reading speed on a reading-comprehension task, the children with low vision comprehended texts at least as well as did the sighted children. Children with low vision need more time to read and comprehend a text, but they seem to use this time with enough efficiency to process the…