Facilitating Reading Comprehension through Text Structure Manipulation.
Jana M. Mason, Janet Ross Kendall · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1979
Two experiments were conducted using 9-12 year old readers to determine how they differed from adults in their ability to identify meaningful units in a written passage, how they were affected by sentences of increasing difficulty, and whether they would be aided by either shorter sentences or meaningful segmentation of sentences.The first experiment showed an inability of children to parse sentences meaningfully.Younger children made irregular markings while many of the older children limited themselves to units identified by commas.The second experiment determined that shortening or segmenting sentences increased reading time but decreased error rates.An interaction showed that these text manipulations improved only low ability readers' scores.There was also an indication that error rate but not reading time was affected by text characteristics other than sentence length and word length.