A 2,217-word news article was reduced 10 percent, 30 percent, and 50 percent by one of three reduction methods: word frequency, grammatical, and subjective. Reduction method had no effect on comprehension at the 10 percent and 30 percent reduction levels, but at the 50 percent level the subjective method produced better reading performance than…

This study examined the status of current reading, spelling, and phonological processing skills of 28 university students who reported a history of reading acquisition problems. The results indicated that 21 of these participants were currently able to comprehend text at a level expected for university students, although only 8 at a rate…

One-hundred and forty undergraduates were divided into seven equal groups; each group read five passages and then answered one of seven types of questions. However, after reading the sixth passage, all subjects received the same type of questions. Reading time for each passage was recorded, and students were encouraged to read faster. Significant…

When college students were required to remember a sequence of numbers before reading a sentence displayed at a constant rate and the syntactic structure was known beforehand, their recall of the number sequence was superior. When subjects were timed while reading individual sentences and syntactic structure was known beforehand, reading times…

Sentences recorded by four speakers with dysarthria and two control speakers were presented to listeners at three different rates: habitual, a 30% slower rate and a 30% higher rate. Rate changes were made by digitally manipulating the habitual sentences. Thirty young normal adult listeners rated the sentences for intelligibility (per cent correct…

This study focused on teacher-education students taking a special-education language-arts course in which information about English word structure was taught. The relationship between students' component reading-related abilities and their performance on three measures of word-structure knowledge, before and after course instruction about word…

Replicates the McConkie and Rayner study (1974) in which the strategies of college students were manipulated through the use of payoff conditions. (RB)

Reports a study designed to determine the effect on comprehension of a significant reading rate increase gained through operant conditioning techniques. (TO)

Reports on a study that demonstrated that college students are flexible in their reading and readily adjust their reading rates in accordance with the payoffs of a task. In particular, propositions expressing case relations were more likely to be retained than those expressing descriptive information. (HOD)

Proposes to test the hypothesis that despite previous negative findings, readers do alter their reading rate according to their purpose and to establish test conditions under which this competence can be exhibited. (Author/RC)

Research supported by the U.S. Office of Education and the Center for Research in Human Learning at the University of Minnesota.

The hypothesis of this study was that reading rate would be relatively constant (within a 15% range of the subject's mean reading rate) both within and across different difficulty levels of materials as long as the levels of difficulty remained at or below the subject's ability level. The subjects were 65 college students whose reading levels…

Points up the importance of encoding time to the global act of reading. (AEA)

A study with 179 Australian college students casts doubts on the usefulness of the theoretical model of human information processing postulated by S. Lehrl and B. Fischer (1990). Instead of reflecting properties of a limited capacity system, the Basic Unit of Information Processing (BIP) seems to be a marker for reading speed. (SLD)