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The present research investigated the effects of negation on young and older adults' comprehension of sentences. Participants read sentences, named probe words, answered comprehension questions, and completed the operation-span test. Negation adversely affected comprehension in both age groups such that probe word naming times were marginally slower and comprehension accuracy was reduced for negative sentences. Although older adults' comprehension overall was poorer than young adults, the negation effects were similar for both age groups. Furthermore, age was less predictive of negation comprehension than working memory. Unlike other variables that demonstrate age-related declines in reading comprehension, difficulties in processing negation may ...

Experts and novices read a biology text whose paragraphs were or were not accompanied by questions. The Text paragraphs contained target sentences that were locally coherent or incoherent and preceded or not preceded by the cause-effect connective "That's why". Connectives and questions during reading increased target sentence reading time. During reading, the coherent (explicit) text versions benefited from better comprehension of information related to the situation model, but not the recall of textbase-related information. The Connective tended to improve text recall and comprehension but only for the coherent (explicit) versions. More specific research on on-line processing should further examine how ...

The study investigates ninth-grade students' use of a reading strategy (the structure strategy) which focuses on following the organizational structure of text in order to determine what is important to remember. Texts read were well organized with problem/solution or comparison structures; signaling varied the saliency of these structures. Signaling effects were expected to interact with mastery of the structure strategy. Regardless of signaling, good comprehenders on the Stanford Achievement Test were expected to follow the structure strategy while poor comprehenders were not. However, comprehension underachievers (vocabulary substantially above comprehension test scores) were expected to follow the structure strategy only when ...

Research suggests that much of the available health education literature requires a level of reading ability that makes it inaccessible to a large proportion of the population in greatest need of health information. The present study tested the value of illustrations and a narrative text style as means of improving the readability of a brochure designed to provide information on cervical cancer and condyloma. Two versions of the brochure were designed, one that had only text presented as simple sentences in bullet-type format (SMOG reading level score of 7.7), and a second version that had somewhat more difficult text formatted ...

Onderzoek laat zien dat schema’s het bestuderen van complexe leerstof soms beter ondersteunen dan teksten. Dat lijkt met name te gelden wanneer men de structuur in het schema markeert door gebruik te maken van de zogenaamde Gestalt-principes. Deze kwestie is nader experimenteel onderzocht. Zowel het schema als de tekst werden met en zonder structuurmarkering aangeboden. De documenten behandelden het politieke proces dat leidt van een wetsontwerp tot een aangenomen wet. De extra structuurmarkering in het schema bestond eruit dat verschillende actoren een eigen kleur kregen, en dat vakken voor terugkerende handelingen een eigenvorm kregen. De tekst kreeg als structuurmarkering ...

This study investigated the effect of explicitness of navigational links on comprehension, perceptions of use, and browsing behaviour in an informational web site. The purpose was to determine whether link explicitness would assist users in overcoming cognitive overload and disorientation. Subjects took a pre-knowledge survey, browsed web pages in one of four link explicitness conditions, and took a post-browsing survey on comprehension and perceptions of use. Link explicitness differentially affected the outcome measures. Organizationally explicit navigational links resulted in lower scores on the post-comprehension survey. A combined condition of semantically and organizationally explicit links resulted in subjects reporting that they ...

Automated telephone messaging systems have dramatically expanded communication about health service appointments, but few studies have directly investigated these messages. The present study investigated whether message repetition (1, 2, or 3 presentations) and listener age (mean age = 71 or 19 years) improved memory for automated appointment messages. Repetition improved older and younger adult memory for appointment information. Moreover, 2 presentations reduced age differences in accuracy of answering questions about the messages. This was not the case for free recall, suggesting that older adults differentially benefited from repetition only when provided with additional retrieval support. These findings show that older ...

Students with low knowledge have been shown to better understand and learn more from more cohesive texts, whereas high-knowledge students have been shown to learn more from lower cohesion texts; this has been called the reverse cohesion effect. This study examines whether students' comprehension skill affects the interaction between text cohesion and their domain knowledge. College students (n = 143) read either a high- or a low-cohesion text and answered text-based and bridging inference questions. The results indicated that the benefit of low-cohesion text was restricted to less skilled, high-knowledge readers, whereas skilled comprehenders with high knowledge benefited from a ...

AIMS International guidelines on ethics in biomedical research require that the informed consent of all enrolled participants is obtained. A written document describing the research, the informed consent (IC) document, must be given to all participants by the investigator. Most IC documents are long, containing much information. The aim of the present study was to determine whether the modification of the IC document by a working group or systematic improvement in its lexicosyntactic readability can improve comprehension of the written information given to patients participating in biomedical research. METHODS One hundred and fifty-nine patients were randomized to read one of ...

This study investigated the role of various types of content representation devices on the comprehension of an expository hypertext. We hypothesized that hierarchical representations, but not network representations, may help low prior knowledge students organize their representation of the text contents. Forty-seven students with low or high prior knowledge in Social Psychology were asked to read a hypertext using one of three content representations: a hierarchical map, a network map and an alphabetic list. Then, the participants performed a multiple choice comprehension task, a summary task and a concept map drawing task. The hierarchical map improved comprehension for the low ...