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The effect of electronic books on the reading comprehension of middle and high school students was examined using an experimental posttest-only control-group design. A convenience sample of 140 randomly assigned middle and high school English students at an independent school in eastern North Carolina participated. Half of the students used passages from text read on tablets while half utilized traditional print text passages. Data was collected during one class period in which the reading comprehension section of the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests® , a 35 minute test containing 48 questions, was administered. Reading comprehension data was analyzed using an independent t-test. ...

The study examined the nature of eye movement control and word recognition during scanning for a specific topic, compared with reading for comprehension. Experimental trials included a manipulation of word frequency: the critical word was frequent (and orthographically familiar) or infrequent (2 conditions: orthographically familiar and orthographically unfamiliar). First-pass reading times showed effects of word frequency for both reading and scanning, with no interactions between word characteristics and task. Therefore, in contrast to the task of searching for a single specific word (Rayner & Fischer, 1996), there were immediate and localized influences of lexical processing when scanning for a specific ...

This experimental study tested the knowledge gap hypothesis at the intersection of audience education levels and news formats (newspaper versus online). The findings reveal a gap in public affairs knowledge acquisition between South Korean citizens (N = 123) from different educational backgrounds. Moreover, the high education group comprehended news with the same level of efficiency across online and newspaper formats while low education participants gained more knowledge from reading a newspaper than using an online news source. Taken together, this study’s findings confirm the knowledge gap hypothesis through experimental research and offer evidence of its potential contribution to the digital divide. ...

Digital native students, as opposed to digital immigrants, do more reading on digital environments than on printed environments. The aim of this study was to learn whether reading comprehension, the key factor for learning, would be affected by this change of environment, and whether appropriate text formats for digital natives would give desired results. This study examined whether the reading comprehension levels of sixth graders who read various kinds of academic texts differed based on the text format. 113 students participated in the study whose reading comprehension skills were determined by IOWA test. Four texts in three different disciplines were ...

This paper investigates the prediction of syntactic structure during sentence processing, using constructions that temporarily allow a sluicing interpretation in English. Making use of two well-known properties of sluicing and pronoun interpretation*connectivity effects and the local antecedent requirement on reflexives, respectively*we show that (1) the parser chooses a sluicing structure over other possible structures when sluicing is a possibility, and (2) the structure which the parser posits for sluicing involves detailed hierarchical syntactic structure. A self-paced reading experiment and three offline experiments (two acceptability rating studies and a sentence completion study) find evidence that readers immediately try to associate a ...

This paper reviewed a study about the influence of (1) font type, (2) text line length (3) language on the understanding of web content. The results revealed that People tend to have a better performance on understanding information form websites when using Serif font; text line length have a more significant influence on people’s understanding of web content when using Chinese than English; Chinese speakers prefer Serif font while English speakers prefer Sans-Serif font in presenting web content. We conducted the research and collected data remotely in order to assess user behavior in their own environment. ...

Purpose:  To compare eye movements during silent reading of three eBooks and a printed book. The three different eReading tools were a desktop PC, iPad tablet and Kindle eReader. Methods:  Video-oculographic technology was used for recording eye movements. In the case of reading from the computer display the recordings were made by a video camera placed below the computer screen, whereas for reading from the iPad tablet, eReader and printed book the recording system was worn by the subject and had two cameras: one for recording the movement of the eyes and the other for recording the scene in front of the ...

With the development of modernization and urbanization in China, more and more buildings develop into a huge collection group with massive functions. People often have to face difficulties and anxieties in locating their destinations. As a non-verbal presentation of information, graphical symbols are often used to help people in wayfinding. It’s comprehensibility that determines the effect of information transmission of graphical symbols. This research collected comprehension data of thirty-two symbols in China. To explore statistically significant relationships between symbol comprehension and influencing factors, Pearson’s Chi-square tests, logistic regression analysis, and correspondence analysis were conducted. From the test results of two ...

I argue that the communication of given information is part of the procedural instructions conveyed by some connectives like the French puisque. I submit in addition that the encoding of givenness has cognitive implications that are visible during online processing. I assess this hypothesis empirically by comparing the way the clauses introduced by two French causal connectives, puisque and parce que, are processed during online reading when the following segment is ‘given’ or ‘new’. I complement these results by an acceptability judgement task using the same sentences. These experiments confirm that introducing a clause conveying given information is a core feature characterizing puisque, as the ...

Previous research has suggested that some discourse relations are easier to convey implicitly than others due to cognitive biases in the interpretation of discourse. In this article we argue that relations involving a perspective shift, such as confirmation relations, are difficult to convey implicitly. We assess this claim with two empirical studies involving the ambiguous French connective en effet, which can either convey a causal relation or a confirmation relation. First, we compare the processing of implicit and explicit causal and confirmation relations conveyed by this connective in a self-paced reading experiment and show that removing the connective in confirmation relations ...