Millions of U.S. adults lack the literacy skills needed for most living-wage jobs. We investigated one particular comprehension process for these adults: generating predictive inferences. If a sentence says that someone falls from a 14th-story roof, a reader should infer almost certain death. On any test of comprehension, there are two dependent…

We employed self-paced reading and event-related potential measures to investigate how adults of varying literacy levels use sentence context information when reading. Community-dwelling participants read strongly and weakly constraining sentences that ended with expected or unexpected target words. Skilled readers showed N400s that were graded by…

Proofreading a text for misspellings involves detecting spelling errors and then correcting those errors. We examined differences in spelling error detection and correction in adults as a function of type of spelling error. We modified student essays to include phonological (e.g., incredibul), orthographic (e.g., decisian), and morphological…

This study investigated the knowledge and strategies that nonliterate adults use to identify print. Participants were 20 low-socioeconomic status Brazilian adults ranging in age from 20 to 74 years. Participants' ability to identify common environmental signs displaying varying degrees of contextual information was investigated along with their…