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This paper presents two experiments testing whether an approach to revise a text that fosters the reader's active processing benefits both high and low-knowledge readers. A history text and two alternative revised versions, one fostering the reader's inferential activity and the other reducing it, were employed. Junior high school students with low and high background knowledge about information related to the text topic participated in experiment 1, whereas undergraduate students with low and high knowledge on both the text topic and related information participated in experiment 2. One-third of the students for each condition in both experiments read either the ...

A major concern for systems developers is the problem of user validation of system requirements. To the extent that the requirements representation elicits important feedback from the user, the representation technique can be said to be appropriate for user validation. Moran suggests that users develop a conceptual model of a system defined as the "knowledge that organizes how the system works and how it can be used to accomplish) tasks". An experiment is conducted to determine whether a task-oriented, downward-cascading menu representation (similar to what the user would find in a prototyping environment), which closely corresponds to Moran's idea of ...

This paper provides experimental evidence suggesting that there are considerable differences in native language attainment, and that these are at least partially attributable to individual speakers' experience. Experiment 1 tested high academic attainment (hereafter, HAA) and low academic attainment (LAA) participants' comprehension using a picture selection task. Test sentences comprised passives and two variants of the universal quantification construction. Active constructions were used as a control condition. HAA participants performed at ceiling in all conditions; LAA participants performed at ceiling only on actives. As predicted by usage-based accounts, the order of difficulty of the four sentence types mirrored their frequency. ...

We examined older adult comprehension and memory for medication schedules conveyed by different types of visual icons as well as text. Three icons were compared: a timeline, a pair of 12 h clocks (one for AM and one for PM hours), and a 24 h clock. In Experiment 1, older and younger participants paraphrased and then recalled schedules that were conveyed by the three icons or by text. Text and timeline schedules were paraphrased more accurately than either clock icon. Paraphrase errors suggested that subjects had trouble integrating schedule information across the two 12 h clocks. Analysis of paraphrase times ...

This study examined the effects of text genre and repeated reading on written language comprehension in younger (M = 21 years) and older (M = 72 years) healthy adults (N = 54). Participants verified four text-based statements (i.e., explicit, implicit, contradictory, and elaborated) after reading expository, narrative, and procedural texts. Verification accuracy was comparable for both age groups; however, text genre, statement-type, and repeated reading produced significant effects. Expository passages, explicit and implicit statements, and repeated reading yielded superior results. Procedural passages and contradictory and elaborated statements yielded less accurate results. Statement-types invoked multiple levels of cognitive representation across text ...

Disorientation and navigation inefficiency are the consequences of the fragmented and incoherent structure of most hypertexts. To avoid these negative effects, researchers recommend, among other things, an interface with a structural overview of the relations between sections. Some authors have found that with such an overview, information is looked up faster and remembered better. This study examined whether a structural overview also leads to a deeper understanding. Forty students read a hypertext about the effects of ultraviolet radiation in one of two presentation conditions (structural overview and list). In the list condition, the same topics were mentioned as in the ...

Elderly people seem to encounter more problems than people from other age groups do, when using consumer electronics products and their accompanying manuals. This may be due to the absence of some kinds of information. In this study the effects of the absence of different information types in instructions on action performance were explored for different age groups. Younger (aged 20-30 y.) and elderly (aged 60-70 y.) participants installed a VCR with the help of the manual, while working aloud. The absence of goal information, consequence information and identification information in the instructions proved to have a negative effect on ...

An experiment was used to test memory for two forms of information?ad copy (persuasive) and consumer information (nonpersuasive) presented in print and screen media. For both forms of information, print outperforms screen on recall but not on recognition. The results suggest that print information is easier to retrieve but also that screen information is available in memory. Differences between print and screen media are persistent and not readily explained by any of the obvious individual factors?comfort/familiarity, preference, and reading time. Other results with implications for marketing communication decisions show that brand name is poorly recalled from the screen relative to ...

Low general and health literacy in the United States means informed consent documents are not well understood by most adults. Methods to improve recall and comprehension of informed consent have not been tested in orthodontics. The purposes of this study were to evaluate (1) recall and comprehension among patients and parents by using the American Association of Orthodontists' (AAO) informed consent form and new forms incorporating improved readability and processability; (2) the association between reading ability, anxiety, and sociodemographic variables and recall and comprehension; and (3) how various domains (treatment, risk, and responsibility) of information are affected by the forms. Methods. ...

Prior experiments have shown that sentences such as (1) lead to a reduced accessibility of the concept mentioned in the negated phrase, whereas sentences such as (2) do not. In the present article, two explanations for this result are investigated. According to situation model theory (Johnson-Laird, 1983; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983), the reason is that the entity mentioned within the negated phrase in (2) is not absent from the described situation. According to discourse representation theory (Kamp, 1981), in contrast, the negation operator in (2) does not reduce the accessibility of the negated concept, because the corresponding discourse referent ...