Graphic novels in the K-12 classroom are most often used to motivate marginalized readers because of the lower text load and assumption of easy reading. This assumption has thus far been unexplored by reading research. This qualitative multiple-case study utilized think-aloud protocols in a new attention-mapping activity to better understand how…

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…

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

Finding meaning in an ordinary prose text and following a description or argument is generally considered less difficult than finding the essential message in a literary text. Sometimes, however, the emotional impact makes it easier for some readers with some texts to see and understand the meaning of some literary texts. Research from the…

In secondary-task reading experiments, easy text filled cognitive capacity more completely than difficult text. A cognitive interpretation is that, in reading easy passages, the cognitive processors are full. But in difficult passages, frequent breakdowns in comprehension temporarily empty processor spaces, leaving cognitive capacity for the…

In order to investigate the effect of experimenter-controlled reading speeds on the literal comprehension of multilevel reading passages and to assess the effects of operant-regulated, or self-regulated, conditions on reading speed, these two studies sampled a total of 400 eighth graders. Two passages, originally written at the eighth-grade level,…

Two experiments assessed the effect of vocabulary difficulty on three measures of text comprehension--free recall, summary recall, and sentence recognition. In the first experiment, the effect of differing proportions of rare-word substitutions were examined in 79 sixth grade students. It was found that a high rate of difficult vocabulary (one…

Reviewed theoretical and empirical work in phonological recoding, concluding that phonological representation is used to aid comprehension and suggesting that decoding graphemic information into a phonological form is important for early readers. Asserts that future research should examine differences in the use of visual versus phonological…

New miscue analysis, which combines characteristics of cloze procedure with traditional miscue analysis, seems to overcome some of the limitations encountered in the traditional method. In new miscue analysis, subjects read selections below and at their level of reading ability and are not agitated by being asked to read material that is too…

Suggests that, in the majority of the aspects of the reading process examined, there was a statistically significant interaction between illustration and difficulty levels. Finds that reading performance in the illustrated conditions was superior to that in the unillustrated conditions at the lower level of difficulty. (JD)

Thirty-eight sixth grade students (20 good and 18 poor readers) were involved in a study that examined comprehension under oral and written modes of presentation and across four expository texts that had been prepared at two levels of difficulty (easy and hard). All subjects listened to and read the texts in a counterbalanced order and afterwards…

Two experiments assessed the effects of text cohesion and schema availability on sixth grade children's comprehension of social studies passages that varied in vocabulary difficulty. The purpose of the experiments was to test the compensation hypothesis within the interactive theory of reading, which assumes that reading involves many…

Traditionally, studies of beginning reading have focused either on between-subjects' differences or on changes in reading performance characteristics induced by specific training procedures. A third approach to reading is a within-subjects' comparison of individual performance characteristics at varying difficulty levels. The present study…