Negated text is a difficult text construction that readers encounter in various forms throughout their lives. Despite a wealth of research on its impact, including potential strategies to improve comprehension, readers maintain poor comprehension when encountering this text construction. Given its large potential impact on reading texts like…

In this study, we examined whether Chinese character structure influenced readers' saccadic targeting in Chinese reading. Readers' eye movements were recorded when they read single sentences containing one-character or two-character target words. Both the one-character words and the two constituent characters of two-character words either had a…

In 2 experiments, the authors used an eye tracking while reading methodology to examine how different configurations of common noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases (NPs) influenced the difference in processing difficulty between sentences containing object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Results showed that processing difficulty was…

Closely examined the effects of word length cues on cloze scores. (HOD)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of focus (subject, object, and possessive) and embedding position (center vs. right) on kindergarten and second-grade subjects' responses to relative clauses. Twenty kindergarten and 20 second-grade children served as subjects. The subjects were middle-class, Anglo children who had not begun…

Concludes that children were better able to comprehend sentences containing pronouns that functioned as objects in relative clauses, but that in clauses where the pronoun functioned as subject, its presence or absence was not important. (FL)

One of the ways to handle the increasing demands on readers' skills is to make writing more readable. The problem has two different aspects: predicting how readable writing will be to a reader, and producing writing that is readable to that reader. Prediction is relatively simple, and can be done statistically with readability formulas. Production…

Reports on a study that found people could follow instructions from flowcharts or lists more quickly and accurately than from prose. (HOD)

Describes three experiments designed to investigate the effect of sentence organization on the comprehension of procedural directions. Ease of comprehension was determined by measuring reading time for two different sentence patterns, while subjects followed instructions to operate an unfamiliar device. Experimental results showed that…

Two experiments offer clear support for an interactive view of sentence comprehension; semantic factors do interact with syntactic factors. (RL)

In English, the word 'to' functions as a preposition (e.g., 'to the store') and also as part of an infinitive (e.g., 'to go'). Two experiments investigated how the word 'to' is resolved by fluent undergraduate student readers. Readers comprehended sentences that contained the word 'to' preceded by sentence context that either did or did not…

The present experiment with retarded and normal readers was designed to test comprehension across major segmental boundaries, an aspect of syntax raised by generative grammars, and to relate the comprehension problem to other correlates of reading retardation by choosing a problem in which ordering strategies may be adopted. (Author/KC)

Reports the effect of the study of connectives on the reading comprehension of 41 seventh- and eighth-grade students. Indicates that the study of connectives had a positive effect on reading achievement. (TJ)

An experiment replicating earlier research on the pronoun bias effect in reading comprehension, in which the pronoun "they" in an auditory fragment influences the syntactic analysis of an ambiguous expression, used a new technique in which words in a fragment are cumulated on an electronic monitor rather than being presented one by one.…