Across languages, certain syllable types are systematically preferred to others (e.g., "blif" ? "bnif" ? "bdif" ? "lbif" where ? indicates a preference). Previous research has shown that these preferences are active in the brains of individual speakers, they are evident even when none of these syllable types…

The current research looked at how listening to music affects eye movements when college students read natural passages for comprehension. Two studies found that effects of music depend on both frequency of the word and dynamics of the music. Study 1 showed that lexical and linguistic features of the text remained highly robust predictors of…

Background: Disruptions of reading processes due to text substitutions can measure how readers use lexical information. Methods: With eye-movement recording, children and adults viewed sentences with either identical, orthographically similar, homophonic or unrelated substitutions of the first characters in target words. To the extent that readers…

Results from this experimental study indicate that naïve theories of intelligence do not play a significant role in the formation of students' judgments of learning (JOL) or students' study choices when reading text that is difficult to process. Students' JOL tended to be fairly accurate indicators of performance on a comprehension assessment, but…

A reading experiment combining online and offline data evaluates the effect on second language learners' reading behaviors and lexical uptake of three gloss types designed to clarify word meaning. These are (a) textual definition, (b) textual definition accompanied by picture, and (c) picture only. We recorded eye movements while intermediate…

Two experiments are presented that explore online counterfactual processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using eye-tracking. Participants' eye movements were tracked while they read factual and counterfactual sentences in an anomaly detection task. In Experiment 1, the sentences depicted everyday counterfactual situations (e.g., "If…

The benefits of extensive reading (ER) are well known, yet integrating ER into curricula has been problematic. One factor is the adherence to the principle that students should freely choose what to read, which complicates connecting out-of-class reading with in-class content. Class readers, however, can more easily tie in book content with…

The present study reports on the development and standardization of a test of phonological processing in Arabic, a language that has been less researched in terms of reading processes potentially due to the limited number of standardized tools. The test includes measures of phonological awareness, phonological memory and rapid naming, and a…

This experiment investigated interactions between lower- and higher-level processing when reading in a second language (L2). We conducted an eye-tracking experiment with the within-subject manipulation inconsistency (to tap higher-level coherence-building) crossed with a within-subject manipulation of word-processing difficulty (to alter the ease…

Reading comprehension performance is predicted by decoding skill and linguistic comprehension (e.g., Hoover & Gough, 1990; Joshi & Aaron, 2012; Scarborough, 2001). However, the type of strategies that readers recruit to build a discourse should also contribute to success in first and second language reading comprehension. Sixty-six French…

Fluency with skills that operate below the word level (i.e., sublexical), such as phonemic awareness and alphabetic knowledge, may ease the acquisition of decoding skills (Ritchey & Speece, 2006). Measures of sublexical fluency such as phoneme segmentation fluency (PSF), letter naming fluency (LNF), and letter sound fluency (LSF) are widely…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the effects of word internal morphological form variation on adult first language (L1) (n = 20) incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading. Design/methodology/approach: Participants were given a 37,611-token English novel containing pseudo words, placed throughout the text by the novelist. Two…

This study investigated the effect that the salience of an L2 form has on learner noticing and production of the form. The study also explored the effects that task type (output vs. input) has on form noticing and production. The study targeted three Arabic forms: a low salient form (the future tense) and two salient ones (time telling and time…

We are very honored to have this great opportunity to interview Professor Paul Nation for the TEFLIN Journal's themed issue on Extensive Reading. Professor Paul Nation is an Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His special interests…

In the present study, the frequency effect was examined specifically in text reading in developing and expert readers. Third graders, fifth graders, and expert readers read the same short text containing high- and low-frequency words while their eye movements were recorded. The frequency effect was observed in temporal and spatial measures of eye…