Research has identified a number of linguistic features that influence the reading comprehension of young readers; yet, less is known about whether and how these findings extend to adult readers. This study examines text comprehension, processing, and familiarity judgment provided by adult readers using a number of different approaches (i.e.,…

As the world told becomes the world shown, the texts of the 21st century will require teachers to adopt new skills, strategies, and pedagogical frameworks to support students' transactions with multimodal texts. This shift from a focus on monomodal, print-based texts to a focus on the skills necessary for producing and consuming multimodal texts…

Presents a model to predict readability of documents encountered by older adults. Finds a correlation of 0.54 between the readability scores for test items predicted by the model and the percentage of older adults correctly answering those items. Finds that more difficult test items were correlated more highly with fluid intelligence abilities,…

Reviews research literature on the design of text for older readers. Topics include improving typographically simple layouts through the use of larger type, more readable text, clearer layouts, and summaries, headings and signals; and improving typographically complex texts such as income tax forms, diagrams, and procedural instructions. (31…