Understanding visual narratives requires readers to track dimensions of time, spatial location, and characters across a sequence. Previous work has found situational changes across adjacent panels differ cross-culturally, but few works have examined such situational dimensions across extended sequences. We therefore investigated situational…

Analyzing constructed responses, such as think-alouds or self-explanations, can reveal valuable information about readers' comprehension strategies. The current study expands on the extant work by (1) investigating combinations and patterns of comprehension strategies that readers use and (2) examining the extent to which these patterns relate to…

We examined genre-specific reading strategies for literary texts and hypothesized that text categorization (literary prose vs. poetry) modulates both how readers gather information from a text (eye movements) and how they realize its phonetic surface form (speech production). We recorded eye movements and speech while college students (N = 32)…

This study was conducted to better understand the difficulties faced by underprepared college readers, including those enrolled in Developmental Education (DE) programs. The Reading Systems Framework was used as a theoretical motivation. Participants (n = 258) completed a measure of component reading skills (Study Aid and Reading Assessment, word…

The spread of digital technology has prompted an increase in the amount of written text that gets produced and disseminated daily, together with a diversification of reading contexts and purposes. In this article, we propose that modern reading increasingly relies on readers' ability to set up and manage their own reading goals and decisions. We…

Previous investigations of satire posit that satire comprehension is influenced by prior knowledge, satirical strategies, and other demographic features, such as age. However, these claims have not yet been tested using online processing techniques. In this study we investigate satire processing using newspaper headlines from the satirical…

Most research in psycholinguistics relies on online measures such as reading time to inform and test theories of language comprehension. However, the value of offline measures such as question-answering performance is sometimes overlooked in sentence processing work. Consequently, psycholinguists do not yet understand how the tasks and measures…

A large body of work has demonstrated that reader resources influence inference processes and comprehension, but few models of comprehension have accounted for such resources. The Direct and Mediational Inference model of comprehension (DIME) assumes that general inference processes mediate the effects of reader resources on general comprehension…

This study was conducted to understand the reading challenges of underprepared college students. A sample of the participants was enrolled in supplemental literacy programs because they were deemed not ready for reading and writing in college. Community college participants completed a series of measures that assessed foundational skills for…

The literature on assessing the cognitive processes involved in hypertext comprehension during the past 15 years has yielded contradictory results. In this article we explore a possible factor affecting this situation, mainly the fact that previous works did not control for the potential effects on comprehension of reading strategies in hypertext.…

This study examined the effects of providing reading strategy instruction to improve the effectiveness of self-explanation (i.e., explaining the meaning of information to oneself while reading). The effects of the reading strategy instruction, called Self-Explanation Reading Training (SERT), were examined both in terms of comprehension scores and…

Rereading can improve the accuracy of people's predictions of future test performance for text material. This research investigated this rereading effect by evaluating 2 predictions from the levels-of-disruption hypothesis: (a) The rereading effect will occur when the criterion test measures comprehension of the text, and (b) the rereading effect…

Although some types of inferences are mandatory for readers, predictive inferences (inferences for what will happen next) are generally considered elaborative or optional. Three experiments measuring probe word lexical decision latencies produced evidence for the online generation of predictive inferences during narrative text comprehension.…

In this investigation, we examine the availability of text elements over the course of reading a text. We describe the Landscape model (van den Broek, Young, Tzeng, & Linderholm, 1999) that captures, in one theoretical framework, multiple cognitive processes during reading and the resulting fluctuating activations of text elements. To demonstrate…