In this theoretical contribution, our purpose is to examine the nature of reading competence as it unfolds at the present and to project that nature into the future. More specifically, we ask what it will mean to be a competent reader for the 21st century and what combination of knowledge, beliefs, abilities, and processes that competence will…

Two experiments explored learning, generalization, and the influence of semantics on orthographic processing in an artificial language. In Experiment 1, 16 adults learned to read 36 novel words written in novel characters. Posttraining, participants discriminated trained from untrained items and generalized to novel items, demonstrating extraction…

Although it is well recognized that reading skills vary in people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), reasons for this variability are not well understood. We used the simple view of reading model to investigate both word decoding and text comprehension processes in two well-established subtypes within the autism spectrum, those with…

Background music has been found to have beneficial, detrimental, or no effect on a variety of behavioral and psychological outcome measures. This article reports a meta-analysis that attempts to summarize the impact of background music. A global analysis shows a null effect, but a detailed examination of the studies that allow the calculation of…

In Chinese orthography, a dominant character structure exists in which a semantic radical appears on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters); a minority opposite arrangement also exists (PS characters). As the number of phonetic radical types is much greater than semantic radical types, in SP characters the information is…

This study investigated the flow of interest in a reading-to-write activity. It was hypothesized that (a) different contents in a text would stimulate different types of interest and (b) different writing tasks would impact differently students' use of interesting text segments. Participants were 247 11th- and 12th-grade students, who were divided…

This volume represents the first collection of empirical studies focusing on peer interaction for L2 learning. These studies aim to unveil the impact of mediating variables such as task type, mode of interaction, and social relationships on learners' interactional behaviors and language development in this unique and pedagogically powerful…

This article examines student teachers' investigations of issues related to writing pedagogy, response, and evaluation in an English methods course, including their use of descriptive review of student writing (Carini, 2001) to analyze adolescents' work collaboratively. Beginning with an examination of prevailing understandings of writing…

Using data drawn from the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted in 2009, the present study sought to examine the mediating effects of three kinds of variables in order to account for the relationships between gender and the digital reading performance of students. The three kinds of variables are (1) online reading…

In this article, we report the results of a self-paced reading experiment designed to investigate the question of whether or not advanced French and German learners of English as a second language (L2) are sensitive to tense/aspect mismatches between a fronted temporal adverbial and the inflected verb that follows (e.g. *"Last week, James has…

Current models of normal reading behavior emphasize not only the recognition and processing of the word being fixated (n) but also processing of the upcoming parafoveal word (n + 1). Gaze contingent displays employing the boundary paradigm often mask words in order to understand how much and what type of processing is completed on the parafoveal…

Background: This study investigates children's ability to generate inferences from narratives containing counterfactual information. Methods: 39 typically developing readers (mean age 10; 05) completed an on-line task in which they were asked to read short passages, followed by sentences which they had to judge as true or false. The sentences…

There is now a growing body of evidence in various languages supporting the claim that syllables are functional units of visual word processing. In the perspective of modeling the processing of polysyllabic words and the activation of syllables, current studies investigate syllabic effects with subtle manipulations. We present here a syllabary of…

The calculation of text coverage, that is the proportion of a text covered by a vocabulary of a given size, has become a standardized procedure in recent years. Such calculations provide important information for research and pedagogy about issues such as the goals of vocabulary learning and the ease or difficulty of particular texts. Chujo and…

English and German readers have been shown to mark a position to the left of the true centre as the subjective midpoint in word bisection. This effect resembles a well-known phenomenon observed with the bisection of solid lines (pseudoneglect), although this behavioural similarity does not imply a common origin. The purpose of the present study…