We examined young readers’ comprehension as a function of text genre (narrative, science), text cohesion (high, low), and readers’ abilities (reading decoding skills and world knowledge). The overarching purpose of this study was to contribute to our understanding of the fourth grade slump. Children in grade 4 read four texts, including one high and one low cohesion text from each genre. Compre...

Dependence on computers and internet has given birth to digital literacy. However, research into its influences on the reading process is still in its infancy. To fill the gap, this study was designed to investigate the ways in which text presentation mode (paper vs. digital) affects reading comprehension, as well as reading attitudes. To this end, a sample of 30 male and female English major s...

We present MCTest, a freely available set of stories and associated questions intended for research on the machine comprehension of text. Previous work on machine comprehension (e.g., semantic modeling) has made great strides, but primarily focuses either on limited-domain datasets, or on solving a more restricted goal (e.g., open-domain relation extraction). In contrast, MCTest requires machin...

Ironic remarks are frequent in everyday language and represent an important form of social cognition. Increasing evidence indicates a deficit in comprehension in schizophrenia. Several models for defective comprehension have been proposed, including possible roles of the medial prefrontal lobe, default mode network, inferior frontal gyri, mirror neurons, right cerebral hemisphere and a possible...

Our goal in this project is to develop a better understanding of young readers’ difficulties in comprehending text, and how those difficulties vary as a function of reader aptitudes and text genre. Therefore, we examined the effects of reading decoding abilities and world knowledge (assessed using the Woodcock–Johnson III Tests of Achievement) on 61 third-grade readers’ comprehension of narrati...

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the variables of reading motivation, reading amount, and text comprehension in deaf and hearing adults. Research has shown that less than 50% of deaf students leave high school reading at or above a fourth-grade level (Allen, 1994). Our question is, how does this affect the levels of reading motivation and amount of reading in whi...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to establish basic reading performance that could lead to useful design recommendations for print display text formats and layouts for the improvement of reading and comprehension performance of print text, such as academic writings, books, and newspapers, of Arabic language. BACKGROUND Readability of English print text has been shown to be influenced...

Grouping words into meaningful chunks is a fundamental process for fluent reading. The present study is an attempt to understand the relationship between chunking and second language (L2) reading fluency. The effects of text segmentation on comprehension, rate, and regression in L2 reading were investigated using a self-paced reading task in a moving-window condition. The participants were inte...