READING AND COMPREHENDING TEXT.

1. READING AND
COMPREHENDING TEXT
C H A P T E R 1 0
L A W R E N C E H E L L E R P S Y. D.
H U M A N C O G N I T I O N

2. MECHANICAL ASPECTS OF READING
• What is reading?
• It is basically an exercise in object recognition, where each
letter represents an object.
• Printed letters and words serve as the data that drives
processing
Reading involves both Top-down and Bottom -up
processing

3. EYE MOVEMENTS
• When we read, our eyes move across the page in a
series of jumps and pauses termed saccades and
fixations.

4. SACCADES
• These are the discrete movements our eyes make
from one point to another when we read, takin in a
visual scene, or searching for an object.
• They occur continually.
• Six to eight letters in length, and take about 20
milliseconds
• During saccades, little or not visual information is
taken in (saccadic suppression).

5. FIXATION
• In between saccades are fixations, during which the
eyes pause briefly to take in information
• Fixations typically last anywhere from 200-300
milliseconds depending on the type of material or
goal of the reading task (such as silent reading, aloud,
or reading music).
• Consecutive fixations in the same spot are called
Gazes. The total duration of these gazes is called gaze

6. WHEN VS. WHERE
• Two dimensions of eye movement are examined
during reading
• When the fixations occur (How long fixations are?)
• Where do they go (what determines the “landing
spots” for eye movements)

7. WHEN VS. WHERE

8. WHEN
• Factors that relate to the amount of fixation time
relate to how challenging a word might be to process.
• Low-frequency words might be more difficult to
process.
• How predictable the word is based on context.

9. WHERE ‘THEY MOVE OR LAND’
• The landing spot for eye movement is determined
primarily by lower-level (i.e., physical) characteristics
of the information being taken in, like word length
and spacing.
–For example, the length of the saccade is determined
jointly by the length of the word currently being
fixated and the length of the word to the immediate
right (based on English language).

10. WHERE ‘THEY MOVE OR LAND’
• Fixations for a given word occur about ¼ of the way into the
word. For example, in the word elephant, the fixation might
occur on the letter “e”.
• Factors that determine landing spots would be considered
bottom-up processing; that is these would be physical aspects
of the incoming data.

11. WORD SKIPPING
• Scotter, Angele, and Rayner (2012) estimate that about 30% of
the words we take in during reading are skipped.
• Word length is the most important determinant of whether or
not a word will be skipped.
• Short words are more likely to be skipped than longer words.
• This makes sense because shorter, more predictable words
don’t carry very much of the meaning in text.

12. REGRESSIVE SACCADES
• You might notice that on occasion the eyes move backwards.
• These backward movements make up 10-15% of all saccades.
• These occur when a reader makes too long of a saccade and
has to backtrack., or if a word is particularly difficult to
decipher.

13. REGRESSIVE SACCADES
• Good and Poor readers differ in the quality of their
saccades.
• Good readers are better at regressing back to exactly
where they encountered a problem.
• Poor readers must do more backtracking in order to
zero in on what they had a problem with.
• Inefficient backtracking is a symptom of poor reading
not the cause.

14. PERCEPTUAL SPAN
• The amount of text that the eyes can cover effectively to the
right or left of any given fixation.
• For the English alphabet, the perceptual span is about 3
letters to the left and 15 to the right of any given fixation.
• For Hebrew which is read from left to right the perceptual
span is reversed.

15. PERCEPTUAL SPAN
• Parafoveal-the term for information that falls just outside of
fixation ( named because it falls just outside of the fovea-point of
central focus)
• Getting a few letters of the next word can aid in the word
recognition process.
• Parafoveal information also assists with word length and location
of word boundaries.
• Primarily, parafoveal information “sets us up” for information to
come. The blank space is probably the more important piece of
parafoveal information.

16. PERCEPTUAL SPAN
• Juhasz, White, Liversedge, and Rayner (2008) outline three
reasons for the importance of blank spaces.
• 1) Blanks spaces make words physically easier to see.
• 2) The spaces between words indicate the lengths of
upcoming words, and are useful targets for the eyes.
• 3) Blanks spaces indicate the end of a given word (i.e., word
length)

17. WORD RECOGNITION
• Direct access view-orthography provides the major route to word
recognition
• Words re recognized by using the written label to access the
appropriate semantic memory representation directly.
• Indirect-access view- (phonological-basic speech sounds)- word
representation goes through a phonological representation of the
word prior to its identification.
• For example, visual recognition of the word apple as a sweet
red thing you pick off trees in the fall involves the activation of the
word’s sound.

18. WORD RECOGNITION
• The Dual Route View-either route is possible
• Phonological awareness refers to knowledge of relationships
between orthography and phonology.
• Phonological access seems to be involved in word
identification across all languages.

19. DYSLEXIA
• This involves specific deficits in visual word recognition
• Dyslexics show a lack of phonological awareness
• Deficits are characterized by abnormalities in brain function,
including impaired functioning in the left hemisphere’s
temporal and occipital regions.
• What is Dyslexia?

20. HOW SHOULD READING BE TAUGHT?
• The whole word approach- involves the rote learning of
words. This is more of a Top-down processing approach.
• Phonics- sounding words out by noting the
correspondence between the component letters and their
sounds. This is a bottom-up processing approach.
• Phonics is more effective than the whole word approach.

21. What might be the result of
using a combined approach?

22. TO BE CONTINUED……

23. SENTENCE-LEVEL PROCESSING
• “The crowd booed the referee after her terrible call.”
• Without thinking we understand the words in the sentence
above.
• We understand the meanings of each word, as well as the
sentence structure.
• We are able to segment the elements of the sentence into
their component parts.
• The identification of the component elements of a sentence
and their grammatical relationship to one another is referred

24. THE IMPORTANCE OF SYNTAX
• There are different approaches to sentence
comprehension and some place the heaviest
emphasis on syntax.
• Word order serves the primary role in sentence
comprehension.
–For example, sentences with “noun-verb-noun” (i.e.,
subject-verb-object or S-V-O) are quite common in English.
Therefore, an assumption of the reader could be that
sentences fit this structure which could guide parsing.

25. THE IMPORTANCE OF SYNTAX
• Garden Path Approach- (one approach to parsing)-we parse
sentences according to syntactic rules, and test one
interpretation at a time. This approach assumes the reader
follows a simple word by word path through the sentence,
attempting to fit each word within the assumed syntactic
structure.
• -As we read, we assume the simplest syntactic structure
and revise as necessary

26. THE IMPORTANCE OF SYNTAX
• Two heuristics are used in this path to parse sentences.
• Sample sentence, “The professor argued the student’s position was
wrong.”
• 1) Minimal attachment- we make minimal assumptions about
beginning a new phrase.
• “the student’s position” is the beginning of the sentence
embedded within the main sentence.

27. THE IMPORTANCE OF SYNTAX
• 2) Late Closure-we try to attach each word that we encounter
to the phrase that is currently being processed.
• “the student’s position” is assumed to be part of the verb
phrase.
• Processing difficulties can occur with the Garden Path
approach as it is associated with longer read times, longer
fixations, and more regressive saccades.

28. THE IMPORTANCE OF SEMANTICS
• Semantics refers to the manner in which we convey and
understand the meaning of language.
• Autonomous View-the analyses of syntax and semantics
proceed independently of one another. Sentence
comprehension involves (in this precise order) computing the
syntactic structure of the sentence followed by building a
representation of the meaning being expressed in the
sentence.

29. THE IMPORTANCE OF SEMANTICS
• Interactionist View-this propose she same component
process but suggests the process of syntax and semantics
occurs somewhat in parallel (i.e., simultaneously), each
influencing the other.

30. DISCOURSE COMPREHENSION
• Discourse refers to linguistic output longer than a
sentence.
• Discourse comprehension can be represented at three
levels:
• Surface Code-precise wording
• Textbase-the major facts and themes
• Situation Model-refers to the “world” it creates

31. DISCOURSE COMPREHENSION
• Situation models can show an exactment effect (carrying an
action results in better memory for a corresponding action
phrase than does readying a simple label).

32. STRUCTURE AND COHERENCE
• Coherence is important at a sentence to sentence (local) level
and entire passage (global) level.
• Local Structure-explicit and/or implicit connections between
individual sentences
• Global Structure-the general knowledge that we bring to bear
on what we’re reading
• Coherence-connected discourse should hang together in
terms of both sentence-to-sentence flow and broader themes.
• Global structure leads to global coherence
• Local structure leads to local coherence

33. STRUCTURE AND COHERENCE
• One source of coherence is anaphoric reference,
when current information makes reference to earlier
information.
• For example, “Greg was anxious to get online to buy
his tickets for the music festival. He figured that it was
likely to sell out during the first few minutes.

34. STRUCTURE AND COHERENCE
• In this example, his refers to Greg.
• The referring expressing is called an anaphor (e.g., his)
• The corresponding events are called antecedents (e.g., Greg)
• The amount of separation between the anaphor and the
antecedent disrupts coherence.
• The ability to make anaphoric reference is dependent upon
immediate memory.

35. GIVEN AND NEW INFORMATION
•Coherence is aided by the given-new contract-
an implicit understanding that new information
(information assumed to be unknown) is being
presented in the context of common
background (i.e., given) information.

36. GIVEN AND NEW INFORMATION
• Clark and Haviland (1977) propose three components in
following the given-new contract.
• 1) a reader must determine what information in a sentence is
given, and what is new
• 2) a reader must figure out what information is the “given”
information refers back to earlier in the text.
• 3) the “new” information must also be linked to that part of
the text.

37. INFERENCES
• Inferences involve going beyond information provided in text.
They are conclusions drawn by a reader that are not explicitly
stated in the discourse.
• Types of Inferences
• Bridging inferences (also called backward inferences) involves
drawing conclusions that tie new material back to older
material, and are important for maintaining coherence.
• For example, Hank was learning to be a better dancer.
• The instructor was very patient.

38. INFERENCES
• Causal inference is a type of bridging inference in which a reader
figures out what must have prompted an event about which they
have just read.
• We assume the instructor was a dance instructor teaching Hank.
Our inference serves as a bridge.
• Elaborative inferences (aka forward inferences) involve drawing
conclusions that add to the detail of a text representation, but are
not necessary for coherence.

39. INFERENCES
• Constructivist view of inferences-we constantly and
automatically draw inferences as we read text
• Minimalist view of inferences-inferences are made
primarily to preserve local coherence

40. DISCOURSE MEMORY AND
REPRESENTATION
• Gist vs Verbatim
• Gist-the basic ideas or main points of a piece of discourse
• Verbatim-the exact wording
• Memory for the gist of a text tends to be quite good, while
memory for verbatim details tends to be quite poor.
• The transition from a verbatim to gist representation occurs
immediately as a passage is encoded.

41. MODELS OF DISCOURSE
COMPREHENSION

42. SCHEMAS AND SCRIPTS
• Schema-the general knowledge we possess about some person, place,
or event
• Schemas make new information easy to assimilate, understand, and
remember.
• Four processes are thought to underlie the use of schemas in
understanding discourse (Alba & Hasher, 1983)
• 1) The important parts of the incoming message need to be selected
and attended.
• 2) The abstraction of meaning from what we’re reading and disposal of
the verbatim details.
• 3) The appropriate schema needs to be activated.

43. SCHEMAS AND SCRIPTS
• Script
• A special type of schema
• Which is generalized knowledge representation of routine
activities, such as going to a restaurant.
• Scripts include information about the typical objects,
situations, and activities encountered in conjunction with
certain activities.

44. MODELS OF DISCOURSE
COMPREHENSION
Story Grammar Approach
• We represent discourse in terms of the important elements of
a story.
Construction-Integration Approach
• We represent discourse by constructing a network of
hierarchically related propositions, and integrating with our
world knowledge.

45. MODELS OF DISCOURSE
COMPREHENSION
• Three sub-processes comprise structure building:
• 1) Laying a foundation-when a new topic is introduced
• 2) Mapping-using world knowledge and linguistic knowledge
to relate new information to information already encoded.
Cues that provide for coherence of text.
• 3) Shifting- to a new foundation upon a change in topic

46. METACOMPREHENSION
• A person’s knowledge about what they do and don’t
understand from a text they’ve read.
• It can be improved by simply rereading material, or by testing
oneself on specific ideas from the material.

47. SPEED READING
• Speed reading is ineffective in promoting
comprehension.
• Speed readers do fairly well in their understanding of
the general idea of the passage but fail to grasp the
details.
• The same pattern can be found amongst those that
“skim” rather than read.

48. THE END