Like the sequence of words in written language, comic book page layouts direct images into a deliberate reading sequence. Conventional wisdom would expect that comic panels follow the order of text: left-to-right and down - a "Z-path" - though several layouts can violate this order, such as Gestalt groupings of panels that deny a Z-path of reading. To examine how layouts pressure readers to cho...

INTRODUCTION Paper has been the dominating means for capturing and storing written language for several centuries. Recently, computers have been established in this domain at the same time offering a far wider range of features. This has led many to believe that the use of paper might be completely replaced by computers in the near future. Yet there is no empirical data supporting such a hypoth...

Research on written language comprehension has generally assumed that the phonological properties of a word have little effect on sentence comprehension beyond the processes of word recognition. Two experiments investigated this assumption. Participants silently read relative clauses in which two pairs of words either did or did not have a high degree of phonological overlap. Participants were ...

BACKGROUND When promoting active travel to school, it is important to consider school and district policies as well as attitudes of school and district administrators. METHODS School principals and district officials in South Carolina participated in the School Travel Survey. Frequency distributions and Chi-squared tests were used to analyze the data. RESULTS Three hundred fourteen persons ...

Literacy cannot be separated from peoples' sociocultural contexts and from their self-conceptualizations within those contexts. A person's literacy functioning will depend upon the role literacy plays in meeting one's goals and in the resulting construction of one's self-image. Within context, not only written language, but the interaction between written and oral language modes becomes importa...

Recently work on the grammar of spoken English has advanced through the use of large, general, and varied corpora of the language, including corpora of spoken discourse. Here I review the research that has been emerging from the availability of such corpora, much of it emphasizing the need for new ways of conceptualizing spoken grammar, to replace the traditional reliance on grammatical models ...

BACKGROUND The language faculty is probably the most distinctive feature of our species, and endows us with a unique ability to exchange highly structured information. In written language, information is encoded by the concatenation of basic symbols under grammatical and semantic constraints. As is also the case in other natural information carriers, the resulting symbolic sequences show a deli...