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The issue addressed in this study is whether propositional integration and worldknowledge inference can be distinguished as separate processes during the comprehension of Dutch omdat (because) sentences. “Propositional integration” refers to the process by which the reader establishes the type of relation between two clauses or sentences. “World-knowledge inference” refers to the process of deriving the general causal relation and checking it against the reader’s world knowledge. An eye-tracking experiment showed that the presence of the conjunction speeds up the processing of the words immediately following the conjunction, and slows down the processing of the sentence final words in comparison ...

The issue addressed in this study is whether propositional integration and worldknowledge inference can be distinguished as separate processes during the comprehension of Dutch omdat (because) sentences. “Propositional integration” refers to the process by which the reader establishes the type of relation between two clauses or sentences. “World-knowledge inference” refers to the process of deriving the general causal relation and checking it against the reader’s world knowledge. An eye-tracking experiment showed that the presence of the conjunction speeds up the processing of the words immediately following the conjunction, and slows down the processing of the sentence final words in comparison ...

In this quantitative study, reading comprehension scores and reading enjoyment level of forty-two seventh-grade males (N = 42) from a Mid-Atlantic private school were examined to determine the effect of information delivery type. In this true-experimental posttest only control group design, forty-two participants self-identified as disinterested readers. The control group (n = 22) received a traditionally printed excerpt from a novel, while the treatment Group (n = 20) received the same excerpt enhanced with embedded digital links through QR (Quick Response) codes. Upon completion of the reading, participants took a reading comprehension test, and completed a reading enjoyment questionnaire. Data ...

This study describes the sense-making behaviors of sixth- and seventhgrade students (n = 46 dyads) as they read and discussed expository articles in print and digital formats. Most dyads approached the digital text as if it were static and linear, despite the availability of hyperlinks. Reading through (or covering) the text was the most commonly observed behavior, occurring in 89% of the coded intervals in the print condition and 76% of intervals in the digital condition. Students were observed discussing a variety of cognitive and metacognitive strategies. The most common strategies were process monitoring, summarizing, connecting, and reacting. The dyads ...

Background: The use of “easy-to-read” materials for people with intellectual disabilities has become very widespread but their effectiveness has scarcely been evaluated. In this study, the framework provided by Kintsch’s Construction-Integration Model (1988) is used to examine (a) the reading comprehension levels of different passages of Spanish text that have been designed following easy-to-read guidelines (b) the relationships between reading comprehension (literal and inferential) and various linguistic features of these texts. Method: Sixteen students with mild intellectual disability (ID) and low levels of reading skills were asked to read easy-to-read texts and then complete a reading comprehension test. The corpus ...

Children in primary school read digital texts for school purposes while current research has shown that forming a coherent knowledge structure of such texts is challenging. We compared the quality of ninety 6th grade children’s knowledge structures after the reading of four different hierarchically structured digital text types: linear digital text, digital text with overview, hypertext, and hypertext with overview. Psychometricpathfinder network scaling of relatedness ratings were used to assess children’s knowledge structures. For each text type, we compared the similarity of the children’s knowledge structures to both a sequential (linear) model and a qualitatively richer expert model. Moreover, we examined ...

Previous studies have shown that students with low knowledge understand and learn better from more cohesive texts, whereas highknowledge students have been shown to learn better from texts of lower cohesion. This study examines whether high-knowledge readers in computer science benefit from a text of low cohesion. Undergraduate students (n ¼ 65) read one of four versions of a text concerning Local Network Topologies, orthogonally varying local and global cohesion. Participants’ comprehension was examined through free-recall measure, text-based, bridging-inference, elaborative-inference, problem-solving questions and a sorting task. The results indicated that high-knowledge readers benefited from the lowcohesion text. The interaction of ...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between connectives in Turkish texts and readers’ reading comprehension. Research was conducted with a total of 50 teachers. In the study group, readers’ reading comprehension was determined through 10 descriptive texts by using open-ended questions. The results of the analysis revealed that, while there is no statistically significant correlation between the reading comprehension scores of the good readers and the numbers of the connectives such as temporal, causal, adversative and additive in the texts forming the study database, a negative correlation was found between the reading comprehension scores of the ...

It is a widely accepted fact that coherence enables a text’s comprehensibility. A major source of coherence is discourse cohesion (textual properties of the text). Lexical cohesion (e.g. synonymy) and discourse connectives are two major types of discourse cohesion. We investigate the contribution of these two types of cohesion to the overall comprehension of bi-clausal sentences in Turkish. In a two-phase study, we ask the participants to judge the comprehensibility of sentences while we obtain eye-gaze data and then ask them to write recall protocols. We find that lexically cohesive sentences (labeled as high coherent) are judged more comprehensible and ...

The current study uses a crossed random-effects item response model to simultaneously examine both reader and word characteristics and interactions between them that predict the reading of 39 morphologically complex words for 221 middle school students. Results suggest that a reader’s ability to read a root word (e.g., isolate) predicts that reader’s ability to read a related derived word (e.g., isolation). After controlling for root-word reading, results also suggest that the remaining variability in derived-word reading can be explained by word and reader characteristics. The significant word characteristics include derived-word frequency and root-word frequency but not morpheme neighborhood size, average ...