We investigated how affective states influence expository text comprehension and whether text valence moderates the effects (i.e., mood congruency). In Experiment 1 participants were randomly assigned to a happy or sad affective state (elicited via films) before reading a positive or negative version of a scientific text on animal adaptations.…

As a picture of childhood composed from the point of view of a young boy named Freddie, who suffers the effects of repeated and ongoing trauma, the experience of reading "The Freddie Stories" presents a number of interpretive challenges: its main character is often split and in various states of disassociation, the difference between…

Linguistic studies related to trauma are primarily interested in how traumatic events can be verbalized. This article, in contrast, focusses on ways of translating a traumatic experience into forms of symbolization that do not report on what happened but rather foreground the bodily and emotional sensations linked to (re)living such experiences.…

Learning analytics (LA) incorporates analyzing cognitive, social and emotional processes in learning scenarios to make informed decisions regarding instructional design and delivery. Research has highlighted important roles that emotions play in learning. We have extended this field of research by exploring the role of emotions in a relatively…

Our understanding of reading--including reading multimodal texts--is always constrained or opened up by what we consider to be a text, what aspects of a reader's embodied activity we focus on, and how we draw a boundary around a reading event. This article brings together five literacy researchers who respond to a human-scale graphic novel,…

Moment-to-moment emotions are affective states that dynamically change during reading and potentially influence comprehension. Researchers have recently identified these emotions and the emotion trajectories in reading, tutoring, and problem solving. The primary learning-centered emotions are boredom, frustration, confusion, flow (engagement),…

Explores how undergraduate readers take the protagonist's mental perspective in stories involving conflicting beliefs about a situation. Demonstrates that readers with privileged information build emotional inference corresponding to the protagonist's (wrong) beliefs; inferences related to protagonist's beliefs are backward inferences at the text…

The phenomenon of a "secondary world"--the world of imagination created by writers of fiction in which writers and readers mentally participate--is described. Theories on the subject are discussed, and a three-dimensional model of the psychological structure of this world is presented. (PP)

Papers presented at the conference on applied linguistics include the following: "Speaking of Grammars: Is Big Beautiful?" (Jan Svartvik); "A Sociosemiotic View of the Grasp of Language at Reality: The Lexical Field 'Aesthetic Judgment'" (Wolfgang Kuhlwein); "Language as a Target and Instrument of the Educational Process…