The Effects of Context and Content on Immediate Processing in Reading

Abstract

Four experiments were conducted to examine the processes by which fluent readers comprehend prose. In each study the material was presented a few words at a time on an on-line visual display and the subject pressed a button to move on from one display to the next. The inter-reponse time was used as an index of local processing difficulty. The results of Experiment I indicated that readers pause considerably at the ends of clauses and sentences, and that they show no tendency to speed up across sentences. This pattern of results questions the role of prediction in reading. In Experiments II and III immediate processing was found to be unaffected by two types of syntactically-predictive clue and the effect of a third (semantic) clue was equivocal. Experiment IV replicated the results of Experiment I and showed, in addition, that pausing at the ends of clauses and sentences is a function of the difficulty of the content of the text. More detailed analyses showed that reading rate is modulated by the frequency of the words and by the number of characters in the display. Taken together the results suggest that reading rate is largely determined by the speed with which a reader can access the meanings of words and construct a representation of the text rather than by the speed with which they can formulate and test successive predictions about it.