Story comprehension involves building a situation model of the text, i.e., a representation containing information on the who, where, when and why of the story. Using fMRI at 3T, domain-specific activations for three different information aspects were sought. Twenty participants read two sentence stories half of which contained inconsistencies concerning emotional, temporal or spatial informati...

Readability formulae predict reading outcomes relying on text characteristics but they do not consider reader abilities. This paper describes ways of formulating a reading comprehension formula which includes reader and text characteristics. An experiment embracing 124 subjects and 48 texts serves to demonstrate the mechanisms through which the formula is developed. The applicability of the for...

The development of understanding of the written text is a focal point in the growth of a child becoming an adult. Nowadays circa 10% of 7-11 olds turn out to be poor comprehenders: they demonstrate text comprehension difficulties. The TERENCE project is an innovative story-telling web tool whose dual purpose is to improve the comprehension ability of written text in poor comprehenders and to su...

The present paper introduces and evaluates a readability measurement method designed for learners of EFL (English as a foreign language). The proposed readability measurement method (a regression model) estimates the text readability based on linguistic features, such as lexical, syntactic and discourse features. Text readability refers to the comprehension rate of a text (0.0-1.0). The experim...

One important issue that any material or test designer should bear in mind is to be careful about developing teaching and testing reading materials which would not be to the benefit of a group of readers or examinees and to the detriment of some others. One of the factors which may cause difference between the performances of English learners or test takers is the selection of reading tests wit...

Cloze was officially introduced in a journal on Journalism as a technique for estimating text readability and as "a new psychological tool for measuring the effectiveness of communication" (Taylor, 1953: 415). Different varieties of cloze have since been developed and experimented upon as measures of such diverse traits as reading comprehension and language proficiency. The findings of numerous...

In many situations, readers are asked to learn from multiple documents. Many studies have found that evaluating the trustworthiness and usefulness of document sources is an important skill in such learning situations. There has been, however, no direct evidence that attending to source information helps readers learn from and interpret a document’s content. In this study we examined whether stu...

Machine comprehension tests the system’s ability to understand a piece of text through a reading comprehension task. For this task, we propose an approach using the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) formalism. We construct meaning representation graphs for the given text and for each question-answer pair by merging the AMRs of comprising sentences using cross-sentential phenomena such as co...

s Scott Crossley Crowdsourcing text complexity models The current study builds on work by De Clercq et al. (2014) and Crossley et al. (2017) by using crowdsourcing techniques to collect human ratings of text comprehension, processing, and familiarity across a large corpus comprising a diverse variety of topic domains (science, technology, and history). Pairwise comparisons among the ratings wer...