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…

This study examined the effects of relevance instructions on English as a foreign language (EFL) readers' text processing and memories. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: the experimental condition, where they read texts to identify a specific category of information, and the control condition, where they read texts…

Text complexity in elementary classrooms is typically measured by traditional readability tools, which rely on surface-level measures of word and sentence complexity. Theoretical and empirical work on text complexity, however, indicates that additional measures of semantics, syntax, and discourse structure may be equally important for…

This study explored the effects of processing texts in print or digitally on readers' comprehension, processing time, and calibration. Eighty-six undergraduates read print and digital versions of book excerpts about childhood ailments presented in counterbalanced order. Comprehension was tested at three levels (i.e., main idea, key points, and…

This study is a quantitative, quasi-experimental investigation focusing on the effects of word recognition training on word recognition fluency, reading speed, and reading comprehension for 151 Japanese university students at a lower-intermediate reading proficiency level. Four treatment groups were given training in orthographic, phonological,…

Forty adults served as subjects in a study of the comprehensibility of instructions conditioned by multicategory compounds, such as "If you are male, or both married and not employed, go to question 3." The stimulus materials were 96 sentence frames of the form, "If you are X, press (button) Y," in which "X" was…

Purposes a reconsideration of the traditional notions regarding reading rate and flexibility (i.e., that the good reader is a flexible reader who adjusts reading rate to the difficulty of the material or the purpose for reading) and suggests that perhaps there is no relationship between reading rate and flexibility. (JM)

This study examined the adaptability of reading rate to passage difficulty under different conditions of task-induced processing. Sixteen experimental passages varying in subject matter and ranging from 85 to 171 words were selected from a set of 32 texts rated for comprehensibility. The eight easiest and eight hardest texts were selected. Another…

Two comprehension-time experiments were conducted to identify factors affecting the comprehensibility of written materials. The subjects (a total of 52 college students for the two experiments) were presented with pairs of sentences--"context" sentences followed by "target" sentences--and were asked to relate the content of the target sentences to…

A model of reading comprehension focuses on eye fixations, which are related to the level of reading processes--words, clauses, and text units. Longer pauses are associated with greater processing difficulty. This model is illustrated for a group of undergraduate students reading scientific articles from "Newsweek" and "Time" magazines. (GDC)

The purpose of this book is to introduce the research on readability, defined here as reading ease. The first part of the book covers how people read. A series of national literacy surveys show that the average person in the U.S. and most other countries are adults of limited reading skills. For example, the average adult in the U.S. reads at the…

Three experiments, in which subjects read passages of variable readability, measured "cognitive capacity usage" (the attention level to reading material) by recording by subjects reaction times in a secondary task (responding to a "click"). The data indicated that the easy texts filled cognitive capacity more completely than the difficult texts,…