The increase in screen-based publishing over the past 30 years has sparked an evolution of reading. Reading's natural scope has ignited interest across paradigms. The resulting scholarship offers rich opportunity, but also presents a concerning challenge -- approaches differ across disciplines, producing results that can be difficult to interpret…

Comprehension models do not often account for the multifaceted and emotionally charged nature of reading in real-world settings. In addition, studies of how reader emotions influence comprehension often yield conflicting findings due to lack of specificity regarding the process, emotion, and task under investigation. The PET (Process, Emotion,…

When learners can comprehend 98% or more of the tokens within a text, the lexical difficulty of the text is unlikely to inhibit reading comprehension (Schmitt et al., 2011). This phenomenon will be referred to as the Coverage Comprehension Model (CCM). The CCM is present in countless articles that describe the percentage of tokens necessary to…

Purpose: We aim to identify the most accurate model for predicting adolescent (Grade 9) reading difficulties (RD) in reading fluency and reading comprehension using 17 kindergarten-age variables. Three models (neural networks, linear, and mixture) were compared based on their accuracy in predicting RD. We also examined whether the same or a…

One of the major aims of discourse-processing literature is to understand whether and when readers form discourse-level representations online. To test this, two word-by-word, self-paced reading experiments investigated the time course of integrating incoming information about the protagonist into the unfolding discourse-level representation in…

This study examined the dimensionality of morphological knowledge. The performance of 371 seventh- and eighth-graders on seven morphological knowledge tasks was investigated using confirmatory factor analysis. Results suggested that morphological knowledge was best fit by a bifactor model with a general factor of morphological knowledge and seven…

In this conceptual essay, we offer rationales and evidence for critical components of a working model of text complexity for the early grades. In the first three sections of the article, we examine word-level, syntax-level, and discourse-level features of text, posing questions for future research. In the fourth section, we address elements of…

Research in four areas has the potential to dramatically improve how practitioners address the challenges of integrating digital texts and tasks into their literacy curriculum. Advances in defining and measuring key components of online reading comprehension are rapidly emerging. In addition, instructional models, such as Internet reciprocal…

This paper provides an explanation for the nonspecificity of emotion inferences found in previous research [e.g., Language and Cognitive Processes, 19(5), 613-638, 2004]. We first demonstrate that behavioral components of emotions, as opposed to emotions per se, are better markers of readers' mental representations of the main character's…

As a result of the Reading First Program of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the view of reading has narrowed. Individual state's Reading First professional development programs, and hence reading teachers across the United States, have spent the six years since the funding of the program in 2002 focusing beginning and developmental reading on…

We review the Simple View of Reading (SVR) model and examine its nature, applicability and validity. We describe the SVR as an abstract framework for understanding the relationship between global linguistic comprehension and word-reading abilities in reading comprehension (RC). We argue that the SVR is neither a full theory of reading nor a…

According to current theories in discourse research, readers monitor a series of 5 situational dimensions during narrative comprehension (Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). These dimensions are time (e.g., the order of events), space (e.g., locations), protagonist (e.g., main character actions), causality (e.g., how one…

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that readers make inferences if those inferences are necessary for the reconstruction of the writer's model. Each experiment involved the same 42 subjects who read a series of short passages. The first experiment examined inferences pertaining either to the underlying global situation of a…

Continues discussion of Ronald Carter's Rauding Theory. (AA)