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The authors examined the effects of two types of pre-reading instructions on students’ comprehension of a high or low cohesion science text. Participants (n=166) were informed that they would answer either multiple-choice or open-ended questions, and for each of these conditions, they were told that these questions would be either easy or difficult questions. After reading the text, they answered both multiple-choice and open-ended questions that varied in depth (text-based, local inference, global inference). The results indicated that text cohesion did not affect comprehension and did not moderate the effects of the instructions. Participants were sensitive to the instructions regarding ...

The usability of interactive whiteboards vs. computers was evaluated on three dimensions (visibility, legibility and comprehension) in the secondary school pupils. The visibility assessment consisted in detecting a visual stimulus varying in luminance using a staircase procedure, legibility was assessed with a targetsearch task, and we administered narrative and explanatory texts with or without illustrations to evaluate comprehension. The results of the visibility test showed that pupils found the light signal easier to detect on the IWB. For the legibility test, we observed differences in error rates and discriminability according to medium, font size and congruence between target and the ...

The processing of high frequency (HF) words is speeded as compared to the processing of low frequency (LF) words, which is known as the word frequency effect. This effect has been suggested to occur at either a lexical access or in a decision processing stage. Previous work has shown that word frequency influenced the processing of emotional content at both neural and behavioral levels. However, the results of these studies lead to discrepant findings because some of the variables that have shown to impact the processing of affective information were not always controlled. In order to make a better characterization ...

Establishing local coherence relations is central to text comprehension. Positive-causal coherence relations link a cause and its consequence, whereas negative-causal coherence relations add a contrastive meaning (negation) to the causal link. According to the cumulative cognitive complexity approach, negative-causal coherence relations are cognitively more complex than positive-causal ones. Therefore, they require greater cognitive effort during text comprehension and are acquired later in language development. The present cross-sectional study tested these predictions for German primary school children from Grades 1 to 4 and adults in reading and listening comprehension. Accuracy data in a semantic verification task support the predictions of the ...

Graph literacy is an often neglected skill that influences decision making performance. We conducted an experiment to investigate whetherindividual differences in graph literacy affect the extent to which people benefit from visual aids (icon arrays) designed to reduce a commonjudgment bias (i.e., denominator neglect—a focus on numerators in ratios while neglecting denominators). Results indicated that icon arraysmore often increased risk comprehension accuracy and confi dence among participants with high graph literacy as compared with those withlow graph literacy. Results held regardless of how the health message was framed (chances of dying versus chances of surviving). Findingscontribute to our understanding of ...

The media play a key role in forming opinions by influencing people´s understanding and perception of a topic. People gather information about topics of interest from the internet and print media, which employ various news frames to attract attention. One example of a common news frame is the human-interest frame, which emotionalizes and dramatizes information and often accentuates individual affectedness. Our study investigated effects of human-interest frames compared to a neutral-text condition with respect to perceived risk, emotions, and knowledge acquisition, and tested whether these effects can be "generalized" to common variants of the human-interest frame. Ninety-one participants read either ...

This study examined the effects of sign design features and training on the comprehension of four types of Taiwanese traffic signs in Taiwanese and Vietnamese users. Thirty Taiwanese and thirty Vietnamese, each group gender-balanced, participated in this experiment, which involved 5 design features (familiarity, concreteness, simplicity, meaningfulness, and semantic closeness), 4 types of traffic signs (warning, prohibition, auxiliary, and indicatory), and 3 training conditions (before training, immediately following training, and one month after training). A total of sixty-five traffic signs were selected as the stimuli and each was presented on a 10 cm × 10 cm white cardboard in random order. Within each training ...

Despite the importance of determining the effects of interletter spacing on visual-word recognition, this issue has often been neglected in the literature. The goal of the present study is to shed some light on this topic. The rationale is that a thin increase in interletter spacing, as in cas ino, may reduce lateral interference among internal letters without destroying a word's integrity and/or allow a more precise encoding of a word's letter positions. Here we examined whether identification times for word stimuli in a lexical decision task were faster when the target word had a slightly wider than default interletter ...

Despite the importance of determining the effects of interletter spacing on visual-word recognition, this issue has often been neglected in the literature. The goal of the present study is to shed some light on this topic. The rationale is that a thin increase in interletter spacing, as in cas ino, may reduce lateral interference among internal letters without destroying a word's integrity and/or allow a more precise encoding of a word's letter positions. Here we examined whether identification times for word stimuli in a lexical decision task were faster when the target word had a slightly wider than default interletter ...

Recent research has shown contextual diversity (i.e., the number of passages in which a given word appears) to be a reliable predictor of word processing difficulty. It has also been demonstrated that word-frequency has little or no effect on word recognition speed when accounting for contextual diversity in isolated word processing tasks. An eye-movement experiment was conducted wherein the effects of word-frequency and contextual diversity were directly contrasted in a normal sentence reading scenario. Subjects read sentences with embedded target words that varied in word-frequency and contextual diversity. All 1st-pass and later reading times were significantly longer for words with ...