Computer science textbooks with lengthy text explanations of concepts are often considered thorough and rigorous, so lengthy textbooks (and class notes) are commonplace. Some, however, suggest text should be concise because people tend to skim lengthy text. This article takes advantage of modern digital textbooks that measure reading time to…

Previous work on individual differences has revealed limitations in the ability of existing measures (e.g., working memory) to predict language processing. Recent evidence suggests that an individual's sensitivity to detect the statistical regularities present in language (i.e., "chunk sensitivity") may significantly modulate online…

Knowledge of academic words, academic formulas and general formulas is essential for second language learners, but resources for incidental learning of these lexical items are very limited, especially in English as a Foreign Language contexts. This study employed a corpus-driven approach to examine the potential of online news for incidental…

Background: Research shows that providing readers with a title prior to reading a passage increases comprehension compared with reading a passage without a title. However, the specific type of comprehension that is facilitated by the presence of a title and how this relates to reading time has not been examined. We present three experiments in…

What is the processing cost of being garden-pathed by a temporary syntactic ambiguity? We argue that comparing average reading times in garden-path versus non-garden-path sentences is not enough to answer this question. Trial-level contaminants such as inattention, the fact that garden pathing may occur non-deterministically in the ambiguous…

Introduction: This study investigated the effectiveness of changes in the test format (braille and tactile tables) and time extensions (1.5× or 2×) for tests with complex tables for students with blindness. Additionally, it examined the challenges associated with the current test accommodations for students who are blind and explored practical…

This dissertation explores the role of memory in language processing, and specifically how interference during lexical encoding can result in downstream interference during retrieval. The dissertation merges insights from both the sentence processing literature as well as the study of memory in non-sentential contexts and focuses on two factors…

Background: Although Zimbabwe has performed quite well on Grade 6 SACMEQ literacy assessments compared to other African countries, reading levels are generally low and there is little research on reading literacy in Zimbabwean primary schools. Aim: Grade 3 and 4 learners' reading comprehension (RC), accuracy and speed in oral reading fluency (ORF)…

As part of the effort to develop an improved oral reading fluency (ORF) assessment system, Kara et al. (2020) estimated the ORF scores based on a latent variable psychometric model of accuracy and speed for ORF data via a fully Bayesian approach. This study further investigates likelihood-based estimators for the model-derived ORF scores,…

As part of the effort to develop an improved oral reading fluency (ORF) assessment system, Kara et al. estimated the ORF scores based on a latent variable psychometric model of accuracy and speed for ORF data via a fully Bayesian approach. This study further investigates likelihood-based estimators for the model-derived ORF scores, including…

Background: School-aged children are increasingly engaging with multiple conflicting texts to understand complex societal issues; however, empirical research has not yet examined in what ways contextual factors affect detection of and memory for conflicts. Methods: The current experiment manipulated contextual factors that included the vocabulary…

Background: Commercial speed-reading training programs are typically marketed with the promise to dramatically increase reading speed without impairing comprehension. From the perspective of reading psychology, it seems quite unlikely that speed-reading training can indeed have such effects. However, research on the effectiveness of modern…

Reading can be regarded as a combination of lexical decoding and linguistic comprehension (Hoover and Gough in Read Writ Interdiscip J 2:127-160, 1990). In Chinese sentence reading, skilled readers' difficulties in phonological processing significantly enhance the 'wrap-up' effect (Li and Lin in J Deaf Stud Deaf Educ 25(4):505-516, 2020). To…

This study examines how the perceptions that twelve teachers of Japanese as a second language (L2) had of extensive reading (ER) changed following 10 months of online English ER. Interviews provided much of the study data, supported by pre-project and post-project questionnaires. The participants' pre-project and post-project vocabulary sizes and…

Recently, the readability of texts has become the focus of reading research because it is believed to have implications for reading comprehension, which is of utmost importance in the field of English as a foreign language (EFL), particularly in the teaching, learning and assessment of reading comprehension. Unfortunately, the influence of text…