The coherence principle suggests removing unnecessary--or seductive--content from educational texts to reduce cognitive load. However, the binary proposition that all seductive details should be excluded neglects images' potential to prime semantically related concepts, which makes texts easier to process. It was hypothesized that this priming…

Native-English speaking adults use morphological decomposition to understand complex words (e.g. "farmer" becomes "farm-er"). Whether decomposition is driven by semantic organization is still unclear. It is also unclear whether ESL adults and elementary age children use the same word processing strategies as native speaking…