Open-ended comprehension questions are a common type of assessment used to evaluate how well students understand one of multiple documents. Our aim is to use natural language processing (NLP) to infer the level and type of inferencing within readers' answers to comprehension questions using linguistic and semantic features within their responses.…

Research on reading comprehension of connected text emphasizes reliance on single-word features that organize a stable, mental lexicon of words and that speed or slow the recognition of each new word. However, the time needed to recognize a word might not actually be as fixed as previous research indicates, and the stability of the mental lexicon…

Previous researchers have argued that objects associated with a protagonist may be foregrounded, or held active, in memory. This study expanded on previous work by using an inconsistency paradigm to investigate the effects of protagonist association on object accessibility. Readers experienced more processing difficulty when a target sentence…

Describes two experiments where readers were asked to restore missing actions and physical and mental states to short narratives. Although some deletions resulted in violations of the event chain taxonomy while others did not, in both cases readers used knowledge of possible causal sequences to repair gaps in stories. (Author/MES)

Describes two experiments testing the hypothesis that thematic titles largely relieve the reader of the task of constructing a sense from coherent texts. Finds that such titles significantly increase free recall of structured or slightly disorganized texts, while only prolonged reading allows titles to raise recall of an unstructured text. (MES)

This study examined how people use inferences to aid comprehension of connected discourse. (Author/RM)

Explores two approaches to discourse structure and comprehension. Illustrates that prior knowledge is ued in conjunction with cues to construct the macrostructure of the story. Provides evidence that text comprehension is based on the presentation of the propositions of the story. (PMJ)

Describes a question-answering procedure for probing the reader's internal representation of prose. Examines two dimensions of a reader's conceptual organization of plot: hierarchical level and relational density of propositions. (PMJ)

Thematization, the relative frequency of a discourse referent, and topicalization are conceptualized as related discourse functions. In a probe recall experiment, a word with a thematized referent was a better recall probe than a word with a nonthematized referent. Also, an agent noun was a better prompt than a recipient, and this semantic…

Fifty-six third graders were randomly assigned to two treatment groups, in a study of the relationship between clause structure and the readability of written texts. The treatment groups read sets of passages which were identical except for certain word-order modifications. The dependent variables were silent- and oral-reading comprehension, rate…

Comprehension monitoring was investigated by asking college students to read and recall passages that contained intentionally introduced confusions (inconsistent information, unclear references, and inappropriate logical connectives). Subjects were then told that confusions had been present and were asked to describe them and comment on how they…

Two theoretical orientations-schema theory and cultural norms for the use of language unify this multidisciplinary collection of papers examining discourse. Chapters by Adams and Collins; Warren; Nicholas and Trabasso; Stein and Glenn; and Freedle and Hale highlight the application of schema theory to the study of story recall, reading, and the…