Speech rate has been identified as a major factor affecting listening comprehension Despite the common-sense belief that slower rates facilitate listening comprehension, empirical studies have yielded contradictory findings A review of previous studies of speech rate and listening comprehension revealed methodological problems Using a novel approach and recent developments in computer technolog...

We consider several recent information^processing models of sentence-picture matching to assess their implications for sentence processing. The representational component of the models describes a task-specific "verification representation" that is derived from a more general representation needed for comprehension. The specific models do not describe the processes by which these representation...

Government-published documents often fail to communicate clearly – with citizens, but also with “professional readers” like civil servants. Visual or multimodal approaches remain rare. In particular, this is an unhelpful practice in regards to legal-bureaucratic instructions (e.g. contracts, rules, policies), which exist to guide compliant behavior. The study explores the development and the ex...

Teaching How to Improve Reading Comprehension: One Way of Increasing Iranian Students' Scores on PIRLS M. Najafi Paazoki, Ph.D. The performance of Iranian students on the international reading tests (PIRLS) is indicative of a major problem in reading comprehension. From a constructivist perspective, there are strategies that can be learned and used in order to improve reading comp...

research shows a positive relationship between self-directed learning (sdl) andreading comprehension. the present quasi-experimental study attempted to expandthe scope of sdl by investigating its effect on the components of readingcomprehension. sixty high school students took the reading comprehension part ofpet as the pretest and the posttest. over 16 weeks, the experimental group,consisting ...

The current study investigated the role of motivation in promoting reading comprehension skills among at-risk first graders. For this purpose, 20 at-risk first graders were recruited to participate in an interactive one-to-one tutoring reading comprehension intervention program. Following the children and tutors motivation level, four sub-groups were created: highly motivated children/ highly m...

Reading comprehension means reading and understanding, an active process which can be seen as a kind of dialogue between the reader and the text or the author. We often hear our students say that they can read the words but don’t know what the words mean. This paper focuses on schema theory with special attention to content schemata, analyses the reasons of the students’ failure in reading, poi...

It is well established that the comprehension of spoken words referring to object concepts relies on high-level visual areas in the ventral stream that build increasingly abstract representations. It is much less clear whether basic low-level visual representations are also involved. Here we asked in what task situations low-level visual representations contribute functionally to concrete word ...

We present-some new results for the reading comprehension task described in [3] that improve on the best published results from 36% in [3] to 41% (the best of the systems described herein). We discuss a variety of techniques that tend to give small improvements, ranging from the fairly simple (give verbs more weight in answer selection) to the fairly complex (use specific techniques for answeri...