This study investigates the effects of background knowledge on Chinese word processing during silent reading by monitoring adult readers' eye movements. Both higher knowledge (physics major) and lower knowledge (nonphysics major) graduate students were given physics texts to read. Higher knowledge readers spent less time rereading and had…

This study investigated note-taking during multiple-text reading across two different task conditions in relation to comprehension performance and self-reports of strategy use. Forty-four undergraduates read multiple texts about climate change to write an argument or a summary. Analysis of students' spontaneous note-taking during reading…

Student writing achievement is essential to lifelong learner success, but supporting writing can be challenging for teachers. Several large-scale analyses of publications on writing have called for further study of instructional methods, as the current literature does not sufficiently address the need to support best teaching practices.…

We examined how Planning, Attention, Simultaneous and Successive (PASS) processes predict reading comprehension in a sample of university students (Study 1) and what PASS processes distinguish adults with and without reading difficulties (Study 2). In Study 1, 128 university students were tested on Das-Naglieri Cognitive Assessment System, reading…

In this study, we examined texting behaviours, text message characteristics (textese) of actual sent text messages and the relationships between texting, textese and literacy abilities in a sample of 183 American undergraduates. As compared to previous naturalistic and experimental studies with English-speaking adults, both texting frequency and…

This study investigates the effect of word study instruction on the orthographic knowledge of college students enrolled in a developmental reading course. Results revealed significantly greater improvement in orthographic knowledge in students who received word study instruction when compared with those in a control group, suggesting that the word…

This study investigates the relationship between strategic reading instruction, the process of learning second language-based reading strategies and English reading achievement for Thai university students of science and technology. In a course in reading general English texts for 16?weeks, 82 students were taught using a strategies-based approach…

Three experiments are reported that investigate the cognitive processes underlying contextual and isolated word reading. In Phase 1, undergraduate participants were exposed to 75 target words under three conditions. The participants generated 25 words from definitions, read 25 words in context and read 25 in isolation. In Phase 2, volunteers…

We examined whether interword spacing would facilitate acquisition of new vocabulary for second language learners of Chinese. Participants' eye movements were measured as they read new vocabulary embedded in sentences during a learning session and a test session. In the learning session, participants read sentences in traditional unspaced…

The current paper examined the role of plausibility information in the parafovea for Chinese readers by using two-character transposed words (in which the order of the component characters is reversed but are still words). In two eye-tracking experiments, readers received a preview of a target word that was (1) identical to the target word, (2) a…

Previous research indicates that removing initial strokes from Chinese characters makes them harder to read than removing final or internal ones. In the present study, we examined the contribution of important components to character configuration via singular value decomposition. The results indicated that when the least important segments, which…

Parafoveal semantic processing has recently been well documented in reading Chinese sentences, presumably because of language-specific features. However, because of a large variation of fixation landing positions on pretarget words, some preview words actually were located in foveal vision when readers' eyes landed close to the end of the…

In this study, we examined whether Chinese character structure influenced readers' saccadic targeting in Chinese reading. Readers' eye movements were recorded when they read single sentences containing one-character or two-character target words. Both the one-character words and the two constituent characters of two-character words…

The general aim of this study was to examine the relations among epistemological, reading and writing beliefs held by psychology undergraduates and the role played by these three types of belief in influencing the degree of perspectivism manifested in a written argumentation task based on reading two texts presenting conflicting perspectives on…

Undergraduates (N = 171) completed a revised version of the Author Recognition Test (Stanovich & West, 1989). The resulting print exposure scores were divided into two dimensions: personal reading experience (primary print knowledge--PPK) and secondary print knowledge (SPK). Both PPK and SPK were correlated with print exposure, but not with each…