Psycholinguistic research aims to understand how people make sense of language in their everyday lives. However, most of this research studies language under experimental conditions in which people are instructed to specifically monitor (and indicate) when there is a breakdown in their understanding. Moreover, there is an assumption that people…

Three ERP experiments examined the effect of word presentation rate (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA) on the time course of word frequency and predictability effects in sentence reading. In Experiments 1 and 2, sentences were presented word-by-word in the screen center at an SOA of 700 and 490ms, respectively. While these rates are typical…

This article presents three studies that investigate when syntactic constraints become available during the processing of long-distance backwards pronominal dependencies ("backwards anaphora" or "cataphora"). Earlier work demonstrated that in such structures the parser initiates an active search for an antecedent for a pronoun, leading to gender…

Distinguishing between interpretive and formal models of discourse processing and between qualitative and quantitative research, this paper argues that formal models are the analogues of interpretive models, and that the two are complementary. It observes that interpretive models of reading are being increasingly derived from qualitative research…

"Levels of processing" is an explanatory framework postulating that differences in memory processing quality or effort affect the duration of the memory trace. Using recall (immediate, one week, or two week) for connected discourse processed under three semantic and three orthographic interference conditions, as well as a noninterference…

This report summarizes computational investigations of language comprehension based on Marvin Minsky's theory of frames, a recent advance in artifical intelligence theories about the representation of knowledge. The investigations discussed explored frame theory as a basis for text comprehension by implementing models of the theory and developing…

Reading comprehension is an active inferential process. Three experiments are described in which the possibility was examined that highly probable inferences are drawn, even when they are unnecessary for comprehension. (Author/RM)

Three studies were conducted in an attempt to replicate previous research concluding that semantic meaning is accessed in the absence of conscious awareness. A pattern mask was used to interrupt the processing of stimulus words after 30 milliseconds; at this duration subjects were not able to identify the stimulus words or even to determine…

Thirty undergraduate students were asked to read and recall information presented in one of two parallel expository passages about the professional athlete. These passages differed only in their use of the "he" or "she" generic referent. The passages were parsed into 19 idea units, and 5 target words in each conveying the…

The main experience of an ideal reader while reading a text is an "envisionment" of that text, a representation in the reader's mind of the content of the text. According to this view the envisionment grows and sometimes changes as the reader progresses through the text, and the ideal reader not only updates and supplements the…

Differences in semantic recall between students hypothesized as having either a high or a low analytic style were investigated. Styles were determined by the amount of bilateral alpha activity measured from the cerebral cortex of the brain during eyes-open baseline recordings. The results indicated that when expository text was tightly structured,…

Much of the current research in reading processes has been aided by movements in experimental psychology known as information processing psychology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive science. The information processing movement has contributed three important ideas: (1) Logogen theory of a cognitive response unit that is sensitive to the set of…

G. Wolford's perturbation model of letter identification is designed to account for identification errors of briefly presented characters. Its chief assumptions are that features are extracted in parallel, that some of these features become perturbed or mislocalized, and that mislocalizations are more likely to occur in the direction of the fovea…

Fourteen college students read passages displayed on a cathode-ray tube as their eye movements were monitored in a study that examined (1) whether letters that lie in the center of vision are used earlier in the fixation than letters further to the right, (2) how soon after a stimulus event that event can affect eye movement control, and (3) how…

A study was conducted to determine how a reader identifies and represents the major topics in a text and their interrelationships. Subjects, 56 college students, read two texts one sentence at a time. Each text contained 12 paragraphs that discussed six attributes of two major topics. The paragraphs on one text were organized by attribute, while…