Individual Differences in Comprehension Monitoring During Text Processing

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The ultimate goal of reading is to understand a text or a story. Unfortunately, there is a lot of variability among people in their ability to understand texts and to keep this information in memory. In fact, both children and adults can struggle to attain functional literacy. In 2018, 25% students in grade 3 and 20% students in grade 6 did not achieve Ontario provincial standards in reading. In high school, 59% of students in the applied program did not pass the Ontario literacy test (Education Quality and Assessment Office, 2018). Given the general need to improve reading comprehension ability in the population, it is important that we gain a better understanding of the underlying cognitive mechanisms involved when reading comprehension is successful and when it is unsuccessful. Indeed, there remains much to be learned about the basic mechanisms involved in understanding texts and then committing this information to memory in both adults and children. Of interest in the current project is how much time readers choose to spend looking at different parts of the text and how these decisions impact their eventual memory of the text. Additionally, differences in readers' language knowledge or attentional capability may impact how they direct their attention and how they choose to adjust their reading behaviours to resolve a breakdown in understanding. By examining eye-movements and neural processes, my plan is to develop a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie online text processing and more specifically underlie comprehension monitoring in readers of diverse abilities. A series of experiments will be designed to manipulate the cognitive demands associated with reading texts. One set of experiments will examine how manipulating text difficulty impacts eye-movement behaviours for readers with different levels of ability (e.g., comprehension ability, working memory capacity & language knowledge). A second strand of experiments will examine how introducing information that is inconsistent with earlier content in a text modulates reading behaviours again taking into account readers' relevant abilities. Finally, to investigate how the text information has been remembered, neural processing in response to content in the text will be compared to content not found in the texts. By systematically examining the impact of several individual difference variables on reading behaviour, we can describe the cognitive mechanisms underlying text processing. A better understanding of these mechanisms will serve as foundational information to inform pedagogical practices based on how readers allocate their attention to key text features.