The current study combined sentence plausibility judgment and self-paced reading tasks to examine the comprehension strategies and processing patterns of Chinese deaf individuals when comprehending written Chinese sentences with syntactic-semantic cue conflicts. Similar to findings from previous crosslinguistic studies on deaf readers, the Chinese…

Background: Recent research has documented individual differences in the reading profiles of skilled native English readers using a behavioural marker of holistic visual word processing (orientation sensitivity). A more holistic word reading profile is associated with a weaker correlation with phonological decoding for word identification.…

Negated text is a difficult text construction that readers encounter in various forms throughout their lives. Despite a wealth of research on its impact, including potential strategies to improve comprehension, readers maintain poor comprehension when encountering this text construction. Given its large potential impact on reading texts like…

The Sentence Structure sub-test (SST) of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF) aims to "measure the acquisition of grammatical (structural) rules at the sentence level". Although originally designed for clinical practice with monolingual children, components of the CELF, such as the SST, are often used to inform…

Purpose: Lexical processing impairments such as delayed and reduced activation of lexical-semantic information have been linked to syntactic processing disruptions and sentence comprehension deficits in individuals with aphasia (IWAs). Lexical-level deficits can also preclude successful lexical encoding during sentence processing and amplify the…

In today's society, we are constantly absorbing information via text (e.g., news, social media), much of which may be affectively charged. However, to date, little is known about how the affective framing of the text itself may give rise to various affective experiences "during" reading. We examined how subtle changes to wording…

Structural priming studies in production have demonstrated stronger priming effects for unexpected sentence structures (inverse preference effect). This is consistent with error-based implicit learning accounts that assume learning depends on prediction error. Such prediction error can be verb-specific, leading to strong priming when a verb that…

In this study, I investigated the simultaneous effects of the reader, the text, and the task factors, and their interactions, on reading comprehension, using explanatory item response models. Analyses of a large data set from a commercially available online assessment system with a wide range of readers (n = 10,547) and passages (n = 48) uncovered…

Syntax, or sentence structure, plays a role in reading comprehension, but how students draw on their awareness of syntax in their reading remains unclear; the mechanism is even more ambiguous in bilingual students. In this study, we evaluated the direct and indirect contributions of syntactic awareness on first-language Chinese and second-language…

The study of word-to-text integration (WTI) provides a window on incremental processes that link the meaning of a word to the preceding text. We review a research program using event-related potential indicators of WTI at sentence beginnings, thus localizing sources of integration to prior text meaning independently of the current sentence. The…

One perennially important question for theories of sentence comprehension is whether the human sentence processing mechanism is "parallel" (i.e., it simultaneously represents multiple syntactic analyses of linguistic input) or "serial" (i.e., it constructs only a single analysis at a time). Despite its centrality, this question…

This randomized controlled trial with first- and second-grade students is the first experimental study addressing long-running disagreements about whether primary grade students should develop transcription and oral language abilities before learning to compose. It is also the first study at these grade levels to teach close reading (using science…

This study aimed to detect the extent to which comprehending elliptical structures predicted reading comprehension. The study utilized a correlational survey model, and participants involved a total of 173 middle school students. Data were collected through two different tools based on the same text in 2019. The ellipsis comprehension test…

The present research explored the awareness that readers have of the difficulty of negative text and aimed to determine whether rereading could impact comprehension and metacomprehension. Participants read passages that sometimes contained negative words such as 'no' and 'not', rated their comprehension, and answered a comprehension question about…

Readability systems have once more become prominent in policy and practice because of recommendations in the Common Core State Standards. This study revisited two features of current text analysis (readability) systems: their generalizability to all grade levels and to all content areas. A database that encompassed texts across the grade bands and…