In everyday life, humans rely on working memory (WM) processes to make sense of relationships between linguistic elements that are not linearly adjacent. For example, to understand the sentence "The dog that the cat chased is cute," we encode the referent "the dog" into WM, maintain and retrieve it after reading the verb…

In this study, we asked how the emotional status, i.e., valence and arousal, and concreteness of idioms contribute to their processing. Additionally, we asked whether the contribution of emotional factors and concreteness is modulated by other linguistic constraints, specifically idiom familiarity and decomposability, that has been shown to impact…

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,…

Language comprehension requires a complex series of decisions under uncertainty. This is especially obvious when one string may have multiple different interpretations, whether due to lexical ambiguity, or the potential for an inference beyond literal content. This dissertation profiles how the human system for language comprehension times those…

Reading comprehension is one of the essential skills for students as they make a transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Over the last decade, the increased use of digital learning materials for promoting literacy skills (e.g., oral fluency and reading comprehension) in K-12 classrooms has been a boon for teachers. However, instant…

Readers build a mental representation of text during reading. The coherence building processes readers use to build a mental representation during reading is key to comprehension. We examined the effects of self- explanation on coherence building processes as undergraduates (n =51) read five complementary texts about natural selection and…

Reading is a fascinating cognitive process through which individuals perceive arbitrary symbols on a page and turn them into vivid mental representations of text. Most available evidence supports an embodied explanation for how readers are capable of such representations--they recruit supralinguistic brain regions in order to mentally simulate the…

Modeling reading comprehension processes is a critical task for Learning Analytics, as accurate models of the reading process can be used to match students to texts, identify appropriate interventions, and predict learning outcomes. This paper introduces an improved version of the Automated Model of Comprehension, namely version 4.0. AMoC has its…

This study used a correlational design and a path analytic approach to investigate direct and indirect relationships between strategic backtracking and integrated text understanding when undergraduates read a digital informational text on a tablet or a smartphone. In digital reading contexts, strategic backtracking involves that readers…

The current study investigated gender (control) and number (target) agreement processing in Northern and non-Northern Norwegians living in Northern Norway. Participants varied in exposure to Northern Norwegian (NN) dialect(s), where number marking differs from most other Norwegian dialects. In a comprehension task involving reading NN dialect…

Reading comprehension is essential for both knowledge acquisition and memory reinforcement. Automated modeling of the comprehension process provides insights into the efficacy of specific texts as learning tools. This paper introduces an improved version of the Automated Model of Comprehension, version 3.0 (AMoC v3.0). AMoC v3.0 is based on two…

Background: Word-to-text integration (WTI) can be challenging for second-language (L2) learners, although it can positively contribute to reading comprehension. The present study examined the role of WTI, after controlling for decoding, vocabulary and morphosyntactic awareness, in predicting English as an L2 reading comprehension development in…

This dissertation provides evidence that reading is best explained as rational gathering of visual information to identify words efficiently. Although empirical evidence from human reading research suggests a close link between eye movements and cognitive process, it is not clear how readers decide when and where to move their eyes as a function…

Purpose: The present meta-analysis investigated the efficacy of anomia treatment in bilingual and multilingual persons with aphasia (BPWAs) by assessing the magnitudes of six anomia treatment outcomes. Three of the treatment outcomes pertained to the "trained language": improvement of trained words (treatment effect [TE]),…

Robust relation has been revealed previously between the components of executive function (EF) and reading comprehension performance. However, the specific role of EF in the reading processes remains relatively underexplored. Within the framework of the lexical quality hypothesis (LQH), this study examined the contribution of EF to the lexical…