Understanding arithmetic word problems involves a complex interaction of text comprehension and mathematical processes. This article presents a computer simulation designed to capture the working memory demands required in “bottomup” comprehension of arithmetic word problems. The simulation’s sentence-level parser and text integration component reflect the importance of processing the problem f...

This study concerns one of the processes involved in written verbal production: text revising. Our aim was to experimentally test the specificity of reading for revision as compared to reading for comprehension, and to determine the cognitive cost of initiating and performing critical-reading processes. A two-session experiment was conducted on students who had to perform a comprehension task a...

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is used to define the theme of a text and to generate summaries automatically. The theme information – the already known information-in a text can be represented as a vector in semantic space; the text provides new information about this theme, potentially modifying and expanding the semantic space itself. Vectors can similarly represent subsections of a text. LSA...

The present study aimed to explore how multimedia annotation and writing summary influence the level of reading comprehension. Annotation is based on the theoretical framework of attention, which maintains that attention is critical in the acquisition process of an L2 (Robinson, 1995; Schmidt, 1995, 2001). In fact, several studies (Bowles, 2004; Chun & Plass, 1996; Jones, 2004; Jones & Plass, 2...

Reading comprehension is widely agreed to be not one, but many things. At the least, it is agreed to entail cognitive processes that operate on many different kinds of knowledge to achieve many different kinds of reading tasks. Emerging from the apparent complexity, however, is a central idea: Comprehension occurs as the reader builds one or more mental representations of a text message (e.g., ...

This study examined the impact of an automated reading strategy trainer called the Interactive Strategy Trainer for Active Reading and Thinking (iSTART) for improving students’ reading comprehension of a science text. iSTART is an interactive trainer that utilizes animated agents to provide reading strategy instruction. The program contains both vicarious and interactive modules that provide ad...

Audio comprehension tests are designed to help evaluate a listener’s understanding of a spoken passage and are frequently a key component of language competency exams. Just as reading comprehension exams are proving useful in evaluating text-based language processing technology, audio comprehension exams can be used to evaluate spoken language processing systems. In this paper we discuss some o...

This study examined whether children’s reading rate, comprehension, and recall are affected by computer presentation of text. Participants were 60 grade five students, who each read two expository texts, one in a traditional print format and the other from a computer monitor, which used a common scrolling text interface. After reading each text, participants were asked to recall as much as they...