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Examined whether placing important words in boldface affects comprehension. In 2 experiments, a total of 120 college students read passages and timed themselves, answered multiple-choice comprehension questions, and produced recall summaries. Highlighting important words produced worse performance on comprehension questions, reading times, meaningful units recalled, and meaningful units recalled per unit reading time than did highlighting all words or no words. Similar patterns of results were found when participants were specifically instructed that the highlighted words were important as when they were not so instructed. These results are explained by the proposal that providing important words leads Ss to do ...

On-line contextual influences during reading were examined in a series of multiple-regression analyses conducted on a large-scale corpus of eye-movement data, using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to assess the degree of contextual constraints exerted on a given target word by the immediately prior word and by the prior sentence fragment. A decrease in inspection time was observed as contextual constraints increased. Word-level constraints exerted their influence both forward (on both single-fixation and gaze durations) and backward (on gaze duration only). An independent sentence-level effect was only visible in the forward direction, and only for gaze duration. Gaze duration was also ...

In literatuur over tekstverbetering wordt gesteld dat, hoewel er nog nauwelijks bewijzen uit onderzoek voorhanden zijn, bepaalde zinsbouwverschijnselen ter wille van de leesbaarheid beter vermeden kunnen worden. Een voorbeeld van zo'n verschijsel is de in dit artikel op basis van experimenteel onderzoek besproken tangconstructie. ...

In literatuur over tekstverbetering wordt gesteld dat, hoewel er nog nauwelijks bewijzen uit onderzoek voorhanden zijn, bepaalde zinsbouwverschijnselen ter wille van de leesbaarheid beter vermeden kunnen worden. Een voorbeeld van zo'n verschijsel is de in dit artikel op basis van experimenteel onderzoek besproken tangconstructie. ...

In literatuur over tekstverbetering wordt gesteld dat, hoewel er nog nauwelijks bewijzen uit onderzoek voorhanden zijn, bepaalde zinsbouwverschijnselen ter wille van de leesbaarheid beter vermeden kunnen worden. Een voorbeeld van zo'n verschijsel is de in dit artikel op basis van experimenteel onderzoek besproken tangconstructie. ...

Studied memory for speech in 18 undergraduates and 18 elderly adults (aged 61-79 yrs) by varying speech rate and average predictability of prose passages (measured by a "cloze" procedure). Increased speech rate and decreased predictability yielded poorer memory performance on retention measures of free recall, cued recall, and multiple-choice recognition, confirming passage predictability as a good predictor of empirical difficulty of a speech passage. Elderly Ss recalled less than younger Ss on all 3 measures, with increasing speech rates producing special difficulty for elderly Ss relative to young Ss. Neither age group showed an interaction between passage predictability and speech ...

Studied the influence of a sentence context on the processing of abstract (AB) and concrete (CON) words, using a total of 38 native English-speaking college students. In Exp 1, Ss completed a word-naming task in which AB and CON words were presented in a meaningful or neutral sentence context. In Exp 2, Ss judged whether AB and CON words were meaningful sentence completions; the words were presented in a meaningful or nonmeaningful context. Results supported a context availability view: AB words were comprehended more slowly than CON words when presented in nonsupportive contexts because it was more difficult to retrieve ...

Studied the influence of a sentence context on the processing of abstract (AB) and concrete (CON) words, using a total of 38 native English-speaking college students. In Exp 1, Ss completed a word-naming task in which AB and CON words were presented in a meaningful or neutral sentence context. In Exp 2, Ss judged whether AB and CON words were meaningful sentence completions; the words were presented in a meaningful or nonmeaningful context. Results supported a context availability view: AB words were comprehended more slowly than CON words when presented in nonsupportive contexts because it was more difficult to retrieve ...

A coherent text normally requires the reader to construct a sense of the total text. So we expected a thematic title to relieve the reader of most of this task. Experiment 1 confirmed this idea by showing that the thematic title significantly increased free recall if the text structure was regular or slightly disturbed, but did not affect recall of an unstructured text. Experiment 2 showed that prolonged reading time allowed the thematic title to raise free recall of a text with random structure. Furthermore, the two experiments demonstrated the comprehensibility ratings to be affected by the text structure and ...

A coherent text normally requires the reader to construct a sense of the total text. So we expected a thematic title to relieve the reader of most of this task. Experiment 1 confirmed this idea by showing that the thematic title significantly increased free recall if the text structure was regular or slightly disturbed, but did not affect recall of an unstructured text. Experiment 2 showed that prolonged reading time allowed the thematic title to raise free recall of a text with random structure. Furthermore, the two experiments demonstrated the comprehensibility ratings to be affected by the text structure and ...