This project involves developing a reading comprehension curriculum based on the Construction-Integration model (Kintsch, 1998) and implementing a pilot efficacy study in middle-school classrooms. The curriculum (BRAVO) explicitly defines the cognitive processes involved in skilled reading, teaching students how to establish local and global text coherence and use background knowledge to create...

In this paper I discuss a form of metaphorical creativity that involves the introduction of „unrealistic‟ scenarios for rhetorical purposes in expository and argumentative texts. I primarily account for the nature and function of this form of creativity in terms of Fauconnier and Turner‟s (2002) notion of Blending, with some references to Conceptual Metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 199...

Sophisticated text similarity measurements are used to determine relationships between natural-language texts and text segments. The resulting linked hypertext maps are used to identify different text types and text structures, leading to improved text access and utilization. Examples of text decomposition are given for expository and non-expository texts. The vector processing model of retriev...

Individuals who read more tend to have stronger verbal skills than those who read less. Interestingly, what you readmaymake a difference. Past studies have found that reading narrative fiction, but not expository nonfiction, predicts verbal ability. Why this difference exists is not known. Here we investigate one possibility: whether fiction texts contain more of the words typically evaluated b...

Recent research in reading comprehension supports the hypothesis that readers are aided by textual cohesion. Traditional readability formulas are not able to effectively assess levels of textual cohesion, nor do they account for potential comprehension obstacles caused by differences in genre. This research employs the computational tool, CohMetrix, to assess distributions of both cohesion and ...

Throughout the United States, many middle and high school students struggle to comprehend science texts for a variety of reasons. Science texts are frequently boring, focused on isolated facts, present too many new concepts at once, and lack the clarity and organization known to improve comprehension. Compounding the problem is that many adolescent readers do not possess effective comprehension...

Generated information is better recognized and recalled than that read. This so-called generation effect has been replicated several times for different types of material, including texts. Perhaps the most influential demonstration was by McDaniel et al. (1986, Journal Memory Language, 25, 645–656; henceforth MEDC). group tested whether occurs only if task stimulates cognitive processes not alr...

Our goal in this project is to develop a better understanding of young readers’ difficulties in comprehending text, and how those difficulties vary as a function of reader aptitudes and text genre. Therefore, we examined the effects of reading decoding abilities and world knowledge (assessed using the Woodcock–Johnson III Tests of Achievement) on 61 third-grade readers’ comprehension of narrati...