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Several government agencies are seeking quality improvement in environmental policy documents by asking for the implementation of Plain Language (PL) guidelines. Our mixed-methods research examines whether the application of certain PL guidelines affects the comprehension and perceptions of readers of environmental policy documents. Results show that the presence of pronouns affects inferential comprehension of environmental impact statement summaries (EIS summaries), but that the effect varies with the reader’s education level. Further, headings in question phrasing affect a reader’s perception of familiarity and reliability of EIS summaries. A reader’s perceptions of EIS summaries and attitudes toward the organizations creating the documents ...

While there has been a fair amount of research investigating children’s syntactic processing during spoken language comprehension, and a wealth of research examining adults’ syntactic processing during reading, as yet very little research has focused on syntactic processing during text reading in children. In two experiments, children and adults read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences such as, ‘The boy poked the elephant with the long stick/trunk from outside the cage’ in which the attachment of a prepositional phrase was manipulated. In Experiment 2, participants read sentences such ...

The present study examined how global text cohesion affects persuasion and memory for message arguments presented in expository text. Sixty-nine participants who held a neutral prior attitude towards NATO read a persuasive text about NATO that was either high or low in global cohesion. After reading, participants voted whether Finland should seek NATO membership and filled in an attitude questionnaire. After a 1-week delay they returned for a surprise recall task. The results showed that the high cohesion text was more persuasive than the low cohesion text. Moreover, attitude after reading but not text cohesion predicted later recall of the ...

In and-coordinated clauses, the second conjunct elicits faster reading times when it parallels (vs. does not parallel) the first in constituent order. This paper examined whether such parallelism facilitation results from simple constituent order priming from the first to the second clause, or whether it can be modulated through the linguistic context (the conjunction and clausal relations). Three eye-tracking experiments on German assessed this issue by manipulating conjunction meaning and type within subjects (resemblance: ‘and’ vs. adversative: ‘but’ or ‘while’; coordinating: ‘and’ and ‘but’; subordinating: ‘while’), and by varying the clausal relations between experiments. Clausal parallelism facilitation was reduced when ...

In the rapidly changing circumstances of our increasingly digital world, reading is also becoming an increasingly digital experience: electronic books (e-books) are now outselling print books in the United States and the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, many readers still view e-books as less readable than print books. The present study thus used combined EEG and eyetracking measures in order to test whether reading from digital media requires higher cognitive effort than reading conventional books. Young and elderly adults read short texts on three different reading devices: a paper page, an e-reader and a tablet computer and answered comprehension questions about them ...

Experts’ explanations have been shown to better enhance novices’ transfer as compared with advanced students’ explanations. Based on research on expertise and text comprehension, we investigated whether the abstractness or the cohesion of experts’ and intermediates’ explanations accounted for novices’ learning. In Study 1, we showed that the superior cohesion of experts’ explanations accounted for most of novices’ transfer, whereas the degree of abstractness did not impact novices’ transfer performance. In Study 2, we investigated novices’ processing while learning with experts’ and intermediates’ explanations. We found that novices studying experts’ explanations actively self-regulated their processing of the explanations, as they ...

American Indian and Alaska Native people suffer extreme health disparities and remain underrepresented in health research. This population needs adequate numeracy skills to make informed decisions about health care and research participation, yet little is known about their numeracy skills. Participants were 91 American Indian and Alaska Native elders who completed an anonymous survey that measured numeracy and the correlation between framing of risk and comprehension of risk. The authors measured numeracy by a previously developed 3-item scale that assessed basic probability skills and the ability to manipulate percentages and proportions. Risk comprehension was measured by 3 items on treatment ...

To ensure that the data obtained through surveys are reliable and lead to valid conclusions, respondents must comprehend the questions as intended by the survey designer and find it easy to answer them accurately. Applying a psycholinguistic perspective to survey question design, Lenzner, Kaczmirek, and Lenzner (2010) identified seven text features that undermine reading comprehension and thus increase the cognitive burden imposed by survey questions. In this study, we extend the earlier findings by Lenzner et al. (2010) in two ways. First, we use eye tracking as a more direct method to examine whether comprehension is indeed impeded by these ...

There is little evidence that readability formula outcomes relate to text understanding. The potential cause may lie in their strong reliance on word and sentence length. We evaluated word familiarity rather than word length as a stand-in for word difficulty. Word familiarity represents how well known a word is, and is estimated using word frequency in a large text corpus, in this work the Google web corpus. We conducted a study with 239 people, who provided 50 evaluations for each of 275 words. Our study is the first study to focus on actual difficulty, measured with a multiple-choice task, in ...

This study teased apart the effects of comprehensibility and complexity on older adults’ comprehension of warning symbols by manipulating the relevance of additional information in further refining the meaning of the symbol. Symbols were systematically altered such that increased visual complexity (in the form of contextual cues) resulted in increased comprehensibility. One hundred older adults, aged 50–71 years, were tested on their comprehension of these symbols before and after training. High comprehensibility–complexity symbols were found to be better understood than low- or medium-comprehensibility–complexity symbols and the effectiveness of the contextual cues varied as a function of training. Therefore, the nature ...