Purpose: To date, research on effects of prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) has focused on a broad range of cognitive impairments, but relatively few studies have examined effects of PAE on development of reading skills. Although PAE has been linked to poorer reading comprehension, it remains unclear whether this impairment is attributable to…

Academic reading in English requires processing of challenging advanced texts for comprehension. Highly proficient second language (L2) readers, such as graduate students, are expected to interpret complex texts fluently and efficiently for academic success, yet the field has little evidence on how these readers process texts. Through two…

Prelingually and profoundly deaf individuals learn to read without complete access to the sounds of language. Nevertheless, many become proficient readers, and the neurocognitive underpinnings of deaf readers' processes differ from those of hearing readers, particularly in orthographic processing. In English, morphological structure is relatively…

Arabic orthography is mainly presented either in shallow orthography (with all diacritics) for novice students or in deep orthography (without diacritics) for superior readers. However, the shallow orthography is heavily loaded with diacritics which may burden the reading process, whereas deep orthography can cause ambiguity (heterophonic…

The current study examined whether readers encode the thoughts of story characters. Participants read narratives in which characters were described as either needing or not needing to remember a list of words. Across several experiments readers recalled more words in a free recall task when the story character was described as making an effort to…

In this exploratory case study, the authors employed an "interpretive communities" lens to investigate the ways in which 12 high school English teachers of one district read and reasoned with literary works. Primary data sources were verbal protocol interviews and semistructured interviews. Analysis revealed that the focal teachers…

Reading comprehension is key to knowledge acquisition and to reinforcing memory for previous information. While reading, a mental representation is constructed in the reader's mind. The mental model comprises the words in the text, the relations between the words, and inferences linking to concepts in prior knowledge. The automated model of…

Reading comprehension tests involve not only reading passages and answering questions but also making choices such as the test-taking strategy to use, whether to search passages for answers, and where to begin searching. We examined the associations between student characteristics, passage type, test-taking strategies, and students' time searching…

According to theories of validation, people routinely check incoming information against prior knowledge during comprehension. On these theories, information is validated if it fits with prior knowledge. Some researchers argue that information needs to be successfully validated before being incorporated into the situation model. We report five…

With the purpose of promoting academic inclusion, it is essential for educators to understand the nature underlying poor reading comprehension in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In this study, we examined the time course of anaphor resolution during text comprehension in children and adolescents with ASD and a group of children with…

Successful reading comprehension is not a guarantee, even for highly skilled readers. When comprehension fails, the ability of the reader to recognize the failure may be critical to avoiding "mis"comprehension (i.e., false confidence in an inaccurate text representation) and to taking steps to improve comprehension. Generally, people…

Studies on the relation between children's reading motivation and early developmental stages of reading competence are rare and have neglected on-line measures of reading skill (e.g., eye movements indicating word decoding). For this reason, we investigated the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation on the efficiency of reading…

Purpose: The use of attentional resources is an important cognitive indicator of reading engagement but it is unknown how this is influenced by linguistic cues. We designed two experiments to investigate whether shifts in narrative perspectives occupy more of the attention of readers and engage them more in the text. Methods: Experiment 1 employed…

Reading is one of the fundamental aspects underlying students' achievement yet becomes an activity abstained by students. In fact, EFL learners demand more enjoyable and diverse reading activities. Most EFL students perceive that they are continuously exposed to prevalent reading activities. This qualitative study aims to scrutinize the…

One of the ways to acquire scientific knowledge is by reading science comics. This study aims to investigate the attitudes (e.g., reading habits, interest, motivation) of university students toward reading science comics, and how they read science comics for acquiring scientific knowledge reflected by an eye tracker. Sixty-five undergraduates were…