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…

Segmentation is a cornerstone of language processing across levels of linguistic analysis, and yet, standard models of linguistic memory leave the role of higher-order segments in online comprehension understudied. This dissertation advances the Context-Sensitive Encoding (CSE) hypothesis: that implicit prosodic boundaries (Bader, 1998; J. Fodor,…

Recently, several studies have suggested that metacognition emerges early in infancy and toddlerhood. However, to date, the developmental trajectory of these early metacognitive monitoring and control processes and their influence on children's later memory functioning remains poorly understood. The aim of this study was to longitudinally document…

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…

Despite substantive work on the cognitive processes underlying comprehension, little research has examined the "phenomenological" nature of reading. We investigated how readers' experiences of visual and verbal thought related to their transportation into the narrative text and whether these were influenced by perspective-taking.…

This study used wrap-up effects on eye movements to assess the relationship between online reading behavior and comprehension. Participants, assessed on measures of reading, vocabulary, and spelling, read short passages that manipulated whether a syntactic boundary was "unmarked" by punctuation, "weakly marked" by a comma, or…

When students solve problems on the Internet, they have to find a balance between quickly scanning large sections of information in web pages and deeply processing those that are relevant for the task. We studied how high school students articulate scanning and deeper processing of information while answering questions using a Wikipedia document,…

Semantic and lexical decision tasks were used to investigate the mechanisms underlying code-blend facilitation: the finding that hearing bimodal bilinguals comprehend signs in American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English words more quickly when they are presented together simultaneously than when each is presented alone. More robust…

The purpose of this quasi-experimental study is to examine whether attention cueing benefits learners of ancient Egyptian culture using mobile-assisted instrumentation. A self-regulatory, mobile phone based set of visualizations depicting ancient Egyptian culture served as the primary instrument. A total of 50 learners of English as a foreign…

There has been a rapid proliferation of electronic books in recent years. Given that dual-language books may impose extra cognitive load on children's information processing capacity, we investigated whether multimedia features in e-books (i.e., audio narration and tracking animation) were effective in directing preschoolers' attention to print in…

Multimedia integration signals highlight correspondences between text and pictures with the aim of supporting learning from multimedia. A recent meta-analysis revealed that only learners with low domain-specific prior knowledge benefit from multimedia integration signals. To more thoroughly investigate the influence of prior knowledge on the…

In the two studies presented in this article, we examine the interplay of conceptual change, text comprehension, and eye-movements during reading and develop and test methods suitable for such explorations. In studies 1 and 2, university students (N = 15 and 23) read a text on photosynthesis, explained their reading processes retrospectively cued…

Reading academic hypertext documents in college brings a new level of complexity that changes the definition of college reading and literacy. Knowing how to read these unpredictable, nonlinear texts requires familiarity and practice. The author describes the nature and usefulness of hypertext, reviews the challenges of reading hypertext, and…

In this article, the authors state that increases in technological capabilities are enabling more students to complete schoolwork in online learning environments--in addition to and sometimes instead of traditional classrooms. Teachers, parents, and learning coaches who are working with students using these online environments need to know about…

In an event-related potentials (ERPs) study, we examined the comprehension of different types of Chinese (Mandarin) relative clauses (object vs. subject-extracted) to test the universality and language specificity of sentence comprehension processes. Because Chinese lacks morphosyntactic cues to sentence constituent relations, it allows a test of…