The ability to form a mental model of a text is an essential component of successful reading comprehension (RC), and purpose for reading can influence mental model construction. Participants were assigned to one of two conditions during an RC test to alter their purpose for reading: concurrent (texts and questions were presented simultaneously)…

Background: Commercial speed-reading training programs are typically marketed with the promise to dramatically increase reading speed without impairing comprehension. From the perspective of reading psychology, it seems quite unlikely that speed-reading training can indeed have such effects. However, research on the effectiveness of modern…

Primary Scientific Literature (PSL) significantly contributes to cultivating students' scientific literacy. However, students' visual strategies while reading PSL remain unclear. This study utilized eye-tracking technology to clarify students' visual attention allocation and fixation transactions during PSL reading, and explored their associations…

Readers often prioritize processing and comprehension of information perceived as relevant to a particular intention. Using a repeated-measurement study, we investigated how readers' prior beliefs and external reading perspectives influence processing and comprehension of belief-relevant texts on two socioscientific controversies. University…

We examined genre-specific reading strategies for literary texts and hypothesized that text categorization (literary prose vs. poetry) modulates both how readers gather information from a text (eye movements) and how they realize its phonetic surface form (speech production). We recorded eye movements and speech while college students (N = 32)…

In the present article, we report two eye-tracking experiments on how Chinese readers segment incremental words while reading Chinese. Incremental words are multicharacter words containing a subset of characters that constitute another word (referred to as the "embedded word"). For example, in a word containing three characters ABC…

Previous research in alphabetic languages has shown that both position (external, internal) and distance (adjacent, nonadjacent) modulate letter position encoding during reading. To examine the generality of this pattern for a comprehensive model of word recognition and reading, we examined these effects during Chinese reading (i.e., an unspaced…

In the present article, we examined the effect of the reading medium and the reading time-frame on text processing, metacognitive monitoring of comprehension, and comprehension outcomes. The eye movements of 116 undergraduates were recorded while they read three texts in print and three texts on a tablet under self-paced reading time or under time…

Eye tracking and event-related potentials (ERPs) have complementary advantages in the study of reading processes. We used eye tracking to extend ERP evidence of Helder et al. (2020) that word-to-text integration at the beginnings and ends of sentences is primarily determined by local text factors (antecedents in a previous sentence) but that…

A word's predictability, as measured by its cloze probability, has a robust influence on the time a reader's eyes spend on the word, with more predictable words receiving shorter fixations. However, several previous studies using the boundary paradigm have found no apparent effect of predictability on early reading time measures when the reader…

Readers' prior knowledge is an important factor for comprehending scientific texts. The study used an eye tracker to examine the reading processes of the undergraduates with high (HPK) and low prior knowledge (LPK) while reading a long printed scientific article. The results of measuring the eye movements offered some interesting findings. First,…

Facilitated identification of predictable words during online reading has been attributed to the generation of predictions about upcoming words. But highly predictable words are relatively infrequent in natural texts, raising questions about the utility and ubiquity of anticipatory prediction strategies. This study investigated the contribution of…

Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word…

This study examined the extent to which textual enhancement and task manipulation affect the learners' attentional processing and the development of second language (L2) grammatical knowledge. A total of 73 Korean college students read an opinion news article in one of four experimental conditions: (1) textually enhanced, careful reading, (2)…

In this study participants read plausible and implausible sentences containing concessive and causal relations in Chinese, for instance, "[Although/Because] he has a talent for language, he [doesn't like/likes] learning English." In two self-paced reading experiments (Experiments 1 and 2), we consistently found the plausibility effect at…