The research genre has specific communicative purposes which require students to understand the tone, generic and disciplinary conventions. The present study explored the potential of thematic progression (TP) to contribute to research argument readability. TP concerns how clauses encode information and how that information is carried forward.…

Investigates readability of different line lengths in advertising body copy, hypothesizing a normal curve with lower scores for shorter and longer lines, and scores above the mean for lines in the middle of the distribution. Finds support for lower scores for short lines and some evidence of two optimum line lengths rather than one. (SKC)

This paper is concerned with the process of human reading as a high-level perceptual task. Drawing on insights from artificial-intelligence research--specifically, research in natural language processing and continuous speech understanding--the paper attempts to present a fairly concrete picture of the kinds of hypothesis formation and inference…

This article reviews research concerning the organizational, selective, and connective aspects of reading and then assesses the impact of constructivism on four reading-related issues in the United States: (1) readability of texts; (2) assessment of reading ability; (3) instruction in reading; and (4) conception of literacy. The article argues…

Explores factors that influence readability and a reader's ability to process information. (TO)

Provides an assessment of the linguistic variables which affect the way in which children comprehend verbal data when they read. (RB)

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…

Investigated within-sentence contextual constraints in a sentence-completion task completed by 408 students from grade 6. (AA)

A study was conducted to define the linguistic and discourse parameters of text difficulty from the point of view of both the reader and the text in order to redefine readability and to provide an operational way of explaining processing difficulties of the near-mature reader. Subjects were 14-year-old students in the United States and the United…

This book reviews the research in the field of typography as it affects children's books and sets it in the context of research on reading. The contents include five chapters: "Problems of Definition and Measurement" discusses the various measures of legibility used in research studies. "The Reading Process" examines three…

The problems stated for this investigation were: (1) to determine the order of introduction of the common phoneme-grapheme correspondences needed for use in decoding of written words introduced in the elementary grades, and (2) to ascertain at what specific readability level a particular graphemic option occurred most frequently. A master word…

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)

Outlines three constructs of text difficulty: text-based (objective), performance-based (behavioral), and a combination of the two (subjective). (HOD)

The relationship between anaphoric nominal substitution and reading comprehension was studied. The Diagnostic Reading Test and the Substitution Test were administered to 80 college juniors, seniors, and graduate students in teacher certification courses, and to 92 college freshmen seeking assistance in improving their reading skills. Positive and…

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…