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The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence structures that placed these NPs at the same linear distances from one another but allowed integration with a verb for 1 of the NPs, the comprehension difficulty was not seen. These results are interpreted as indicating that similarity-based interference occurs online during the comprehension of complex sentences and ...

The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence structures that placed these NPs at the same linear distances from one another but allowed integration with a verb for 1 of the NPs, the comprehension difficulty was not seen. These results are interpreted as indicating that similarity-based interference occurs online during the comprehension of complex sentences and ...

All other things being equal the parser favors attaching an ambiguous modifier to the most recent possible site. A plausible explanation is that locality preferences such as this arise in the service of minimizing memory costs-more distant sentential material is more difficult to reactivate than more recent material. Note that processing any sentence requires linking each new lexical item with material in the current parse. This often involves the construction of long-distance dependencies. Under a resource-limited view of language processing, lengthy integrations should induce difficulty even in unambiguous sentences. To date there has been little direct quantitative evidence in support ...

All other things being equal the parser favors attaching an ambiguous modifier to the most recent possible site. A plausible explanation is that locality preferences such as this arise in the service of minimizing memory costs-more distant sentential material is more difficult to reactivate than more recent material. Note that processing any sentence requires linking each new lexical item with material in the current parse. This often involves the construction of long-distance dependencies. Under a resource-limited view of language processing, lengthy integrations should induce difficulty even in unambiguous sentences. To date there has been little direct quantitative evidence in support ...

This study was designed to investigate the comparative effects of the explicitness of two types of intersentential coherence relations on college students' comprehension. The explicitness of argument repetitions (AR) and connective concepts (CC) was varied across forms of an experimental passage resulting in the following four versions: exlicit AR/implicit CC, explicit CC/implicit AR, both explicit, both implicit.College students were randomly assigned to one of the four versions. They silently read the passage and then immediately wrote their recall protocols. The results indicated that there were no significant differences among the groups at either the micro or macro levels in terms ...

Over het effect van coherentiemarkering op hetbegrijpen van informerende teksten is al het een en ander bekend. Dit onderzoek richt zich op hetuitbreiden van deze theoretische en experimentelekennis door een verbeterde replicatie vanMcNamara en Kintsch (1996), waarin demanipulaties van coherentiemarkeringen en deoperationalisering van voorkennis zijn aangepast.Eerder onderzoek concentreerde zich vooral opcognitieve effecten van coherentiemarkering. In ditonderzoek wordt ook aandacht besteed aanaffectieve effecten. Bovendien worden naastinformerende teksten een tweede teksttypeonderzocht: persuasieve teksten. Uit een eersteexperiment blijkt dat het effect vancoherentiemarkering en voorkennis verschilt inbeide genres: op begrip treedt in informerendeteksten een interactie-effect van coherentiemarkeringenen voorkennis op, in persuasieveteksten is sprake van ...

Two studies examined 2 explanations of the levels effect in text memory. The structural height account emphasizes the height of an area in a text structure as the major determinant of the idea's memorability. The referential coherence explanation focuses on the nature of the cognitive processes that occur during comprehension. 144 undergraduates read 1 of 4 versions of a text that varied the height of target paragraphs and the referential coherence of text subsequent to the target paragraphs. Free-recall protocols were scored for the presence of propositions from the target paragraph. Results support the predictions of the referential coherence formulation ...

Previous research (e.g., McNamara, Kintsch, Songer, & Kintsch, 1996) has demonstrated that high-knowledge readers learn more from low-coherence than high-coherence texts. This study further examined the assumption that this advantage is due to the use of knowledge to fill in the gaps in the text, resulting in an integration of the text with prior knowledge. Participants read either a high- or low-coherence text twice, or they read both the high- and low-coherence texts in one order or the other. Reading the low-coherence text first should force the reader to use prior knowledge to fill in the conceptual gaps. However, reading ...

We examined the kinds of information in a prose passage that is better remembered when depictive illustrations are embedded in the passage than when the passage contains no illustrations. Experiment 1 showed that (1) pictures depicting details effectively increased recall of those details and (2) pictures depicting relationships effectively increased recall of that relational information (relative to a no-picture control condition). In Experiment 2, comprehension skill was found to modulate the general effects obtained in Experiment 1. Detail pictures enhanced the recall of targeted details for all skill levels. Relational pictures enhanced recall of pictured relational information for highly skilled ...

The purpose of this article was to explore the concept of interest, one of the critical positive emotions in learning contexts and to investigate the effects of different types of visual illustrations on learning interest, achievement, and motivation in multimedia learning. The concept of interest was explored in light of positive emotion; an experiment was conducted to examine the effects of visual illustrations. In the experiment, participants were drawn from two classes of "Introduction to Educational Technology" and randomly assigned to one of the three conditions: (a) cognitive interest illustration condition, (b) emotional interest illustration condition, and (c) text-only condition. ...