The use of the audio medium (e.g., audiobooks and podcasts) is proliferating in everyday and educational contexts. Yet, research investigating text processing in audio compared to the more commonly used print medium is limited in scope. Specifically, the research so far has majorly focused on younger learners or English language learners,…

Segmentation is a cornerstone of language processing across levels of linguistic analysis, and yet, standard models of linguistic memory leave the role of higher-order segments in online comprehension understudied. This dissertation advances the Context-Sensitive Encoding (CSE) hypothesis: that implicit prosodic boundaries (Bader, 1998; J. Fodor,…

The positive effects of bi-modal input on language learning are becoming a largely accepted experimental finding. However, experiments looking at bi-modal reading in a foreign language are normally limited by the common experimental situation of classroom-based researchers studying university age participants for the limited timespan of a…

Language comprehension requires a complex series of decisions under uncertainty. This is especially obvious when one string may have multiple different interpretations, whether due to lexical ambiguity, or the potential for an inference beyond literal content. This dissertation profiles how the human system for language comprehension times those…

Reading is a fascinating cognitive process through which individuals perceive arbitrary symbols on a page and turn them into vivid mental representations of text. Most available evidence supports an embodied explanation for how readers are capable of such representations--they recruit supralinguistic brain regions in order to mentally simulate the…

This dissertation provides evidence that reading is best explained as rational gathering of visual information to identify words efficiently. Although empirical evidence from human reading research suggests a close link between eye movements and cognitive process, it is not clear how readers decide when and where to move their eyes as a function…

The study tested how the Recency Preference and Predicate Proximity model (Gibson et al. in Cognition 59(1):23-59, 1996, https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(88)90004-2) plays out by examining the attachment preferences of native Russian speakers when processing locally ambiguous participial relative clause sentences with three potential NP…

Text comprehension is an essential skill in today's information-rich world, and self-explanation practice helps students improve their understanding of complex texts. This study was centered on leveraging open-source Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically FLAN-T5, to automatically assess the comprehension strategies employed by readers while…

Theories of multimedia learning suggest that learners can form better referential connections when verbal and visual materials are presented simultaneously. Furthermore, the addition of auditory input in reading-while-listening conditions benefits performance on a variety of linguistic tasks. However, little research has been conducted on the…

Background: A significant portion of adults struggle to read at a basic level. Word reading (defined here as decoding and word recognition) appears to play a pivotal role for this population of readers; however, less is known about how word reading relates to other important semantic processes (e.g., vocabulary, sentence processing) known to…

This study examined the effects of working memory (WM), structure, and salience on the processing of English relative clauses (RCs) and participial reduced relative clauses (PRRCs) by L1 Thai learners. Salience in this research is the phonological alterations required for irregular verbs to inflect into the past participial form. The study…

Informed by a theoretical model of satirical uptake, this study investigated processing behavior and comprehension of satirical news articles. Reading times for segments of minimally different satirical and non-satirical texts were collected using within-subjects (Experiment 1) and between-subjects (Experiment 2) designs. Segment reading times and…

In the present article, we examined the effect of the reading medium and the reading time-frame on text processing, metacognitive monitoring of comprehension, and comprehension outcomes. The eye movements of 116 undergraduates were recorded while they read three texts in print and three texts on a tablet under self-paced reading time or under time…

Mind-wandering (i.e., thoughts irrelevant to the current task) occurs frequently during reading. The current study examined whether mind-wandering was associated with reduced rereading when the reader read the so-called garden-path jokes. In a garden-path joke, the reader's initial interpretation is violated by the final punchline, and the…

Eye tracking and event-related potentials (ERPs) have complementary advantages in the study of reading processes. We used eye tracking to extend ERP evidence of Helder et al. (2020) that word-to-text integration at the beginnings and ends of sentences is primarily determined by local text factors (antecedents in a previous sentence) but that…