Text comprehension involves the ability to understand how texts relate to the situation they describe and to each other (i.e., a Document model). Research into Document models has emphasized the role of information sources in structuring readers' mental models of situations. The present article reviews research on source comprehension and examines…

The coherence threshold marks the point at which a reader has gained a sufficient comprehension level to move on in a text. Previous research has demonstrated that the readers' coherence threshold can be manipulated by increasing or decreasing task demands. The present experiments examined a manipulation of the coherence threshold within the text…

Studies investigating the effect of connectives on comprehension have yielded different results, most likely because of differences in methodology and limited samples of texts and readers. We added and removed causal, temporal, contrastive, and additive connectives in 20 authentic Dutch texts. Dutch adolescents (n = 794) differing in reading…

An overarching motivation driving my research has been to further our theoretical understanding of how readers successfully comprehend challenging text. This article describes the theoretical origins of this research program and my quest to understand comprehension processes through the use of technology. Coh-Metrix was developed to measure, and…

This study aims to establish whether the processing of different connectives (e.g., "and," "but") and different coherence relations (addition, contrast) can be modulated by a structural feature of the connected segments--namely, parallelism. While "but" is mainly used to contrast two expressions, "and"…

In this article, I review and discuss the work presented in this special issue while focusing on a number of issues that warrant further investigation in validation research. These issues pertain to the nature of the validation processes, the processes and mechanisms that support validation during comprehension, the factors that influence…