Do graphical overviews facilitate or hinder comprehension in hypertext?

Educational hypertexts usually include graphical overviews, conveying the structure of the text schematically with the aim of fostering comprehension. Despite the claims about their relevance, there is currently no consensus on the impact that hypertext overviews have on the reader's comprehension. In the present paper we have explored how hypertext overviews might affect comprehension with regard to (a) the time at which students read the overview and (b) the hypertext difficulty. The results from two eye-tracking studies revealed that reading a graphical overview at the beginning of the hypertext is related to an improvement in the participant's comprehension of quite difficult hypertexts…

Easy-to-read Texts for Students with Intellectual Disability: Linguistic Factors Affecting Comprehension

Background: The use of ‘easy-to-read’ materials for people with intellectual disabilities has become very widespread but their effectiveness has scarcely been evaluated. In this study, the framework provided by Kintsch's Construction–Integration Model (1988) is used to examine (i) the reading comprehension levels of different passages of the Spanish text that have been designed following easy-to-read guidelines and (ii) the relationships between reading comprehension (literal and inferential) and various linguistic features of these texts. Method: Sixteen students with mild intellectual disability and low levels of reading skills were asked to read easy-to-read texts and then complete a rea…

Corrigendum to: Time-Course of Grammatical Processing in Deaf Readers: An Eye-Movement Study

Did the three little pigs frighten the wolf? How deaf readers use lexical and syntactic cues to comprehend sentences

Abstract Background The ways in which students with deafness process syntactic and semantic cues while reading sentences are unclear. While some studies have supported the preference for semantic cues, others have not. Aim To examine differences in the processing of syntactic versus semantic cues during sentence reading among students who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). Method Twenty DHH students (mean age = 12.48 years) and 20 chronologically age-matched students with typical hearing (TH) were asked to read sentences written in Spanish with different grammatical structures and to choose the picture that best matched the sentences’ meaning while their eye movements were being registered.…

Who do you refer to? How young students with mild intellectual disability confront anaphoric ambiguities in texts and sentences.

Along 2 experiments we tested the anaphoric pronoun resolution abilities of readers with intellectual disability in comparison with chronological and reading age-matched groups. In Experiment 1, the anaphor test of Elosua, Carriedo, and Garcia-Madruga (2009) confirmed that readers with intellectual disability (ID) are slower than control readers resolving clitic anaphoric pronouns, especially when the use of morphological cues (e.g. gender) is necessary. In order to test if the poor performance could be due to low levels of metacognitive skills during reading, an inconsistency detection task combined with eye tracking was designed in Experiment 2. Participants read short texts with an anaph…

Do Sign Language Videos Improve Web Navigation for Deaf Signer Users?

The efficacy of video-based sign language (SL) navigation aids to improve Web search for Deaf Signers was tested by two experiments. Experiment 1 compared 2 navigation aids based on text hyperlinks linked to embedded SL videos, which differed in the spatial contiguity between the text hyperlink and SL video (contiguous vs. distant). Deaf Signers’ performance was similar in Web search using both aids, but a positive correlation between their word categorization abilities and search efficiency appeared in the distant condition. In Experiment 2, the contiguous condition was compared with a text-only hyperlink condition. Deaf Signers became less disorientated (used shorter paths to find the tar…

READ-COGvid: A Database From Reading and Media Habits During COVID-19 Confinement in Spain and Italy

Beyond the Educational Context: Relevance of Intrinsic Reading Motivation During COVID-19 Confinement in Spain

What role could have intrinsic motivation toward reading in an extraordinary situation like the recent confinement? This research examines the relationship between intrinsic reading motivation (IRM) and reading habits in an adult population considering types of reading (for leisure, work/study, social networks, and news), gender, and distress generated by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Participants were 3,849 adults from Spain who were surveyed about their reading practices: before, during the first weeks, and after several weeks of confinement. Linear mixed effects models (LMMs) were used to analyze data. Results showed a three-way interaction between reading frequency, …

¿Son realmente tan buenos los nativos digitales?: relación entre las habilidades digitales y la lectura digital

Digital reading literacy consists on the comprehension, use, reflection and enjoyment of written texts with the aim to fulfill our goals, to develop our knowledge and potential, and to participate in our society. Currently it is considered that “digital natives”, i.e. those students that have been raised surrounded by information technologies, poses the basic digital skills (such as using the mouse, the browser, …) required to develop digital reading skills. The present study tested this assumption, by means of a study in which students of 5th level of primary education and 3rd level of secondary education performed a series of digital reading tasks. In addition, students completed several …

Time-Course of Grammatical Processing in Deaf Readers: An Eye-Movement Study.

Abstract Twenty participants who were deaf and 20 chronological age-matched participants with typical hearing (TH) (mean age: 12 years) were asked to judge the correctness of written sentences with or without a grammatically incongruent word while their eye movements were registered. TH participants outperformed deaf participants in grammaticality judgment accuracy. For both groups, First Pass and Total Fixation Times of target words in correct trials were significantly longer in the incongruent condition than in the congruent one. However, whereas TH students showed longer First Pass in the target area than deaf students across congruity conditions, deaf students made more fixations than t…

Anaphor Processing During Reading Comprehension in Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder

With the purpose of promoting academic inclusion, it is essential for educators to understand the nature underlying poor reading comprehension in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In th...

Learning through video blogs

Previous research have found evidences of both, low traditional literacy skills (e.g. reading) and low digital literacy skills (computers and Internet skills) in the population of young students with intellectual disabilities ID). The main goal of this study was to test if learning content in the Internet was enhanced or interfered by video blog presentation mode for this population. In particular, we explored the metacognitive deficit hypothesis by Ackerman & Goldsmith [1] which predicts that a) monitoring accuracy (difference between predicted and actual comprehension) will be lower in videos than in texts; b) restudy decisions will be more efficient in the text medium (i.e. higher restud…

Retos de la educación online en estudiantes con sordera

Evaluar mediante un cuestionario las dificultades de escucha que afronta el alumnado universitario con pérdida auditiva cuando recibe clases virtuales. No sólo hablaremos de alumnado con sordera sino también con hipoacusia en los que la percepción del habla, especialmente en entornos ruidosos, se ve afectada. Dentro del Proyecto “Impacto de las mascarillas faciales en la percepción del habla en el aula”

Shared online spreadsheets and hidden profiles: Technological effects on dyad decision strategy

We report a study in which dyads use Instant Messaging to agree a preference among a set of three apartments. The information given to participants is partially overlapping, and contains a ''hidden profile'' (HP), such that a single apartment emerges as the best according to an unweighted sum of feature values only if dyad members pool information that is presented to only one of them. When dyads were additionally provided with a shared online spreadsheet, their decision strategy was more likely to be compensatory and relatively exhaustive, even if the distribution of importance among the cues in which the apartments vary meant that a ''fast and frugal'' heuristic such as take-the-best woul…

¿El confinamiento cambió el uso y la percepción de Internet de las personas con DI y de sus familias?

El principal objetivo de este trabajo fue conocer cómo estaba influyendo el confinamiento en los jóvenes con DI y sus familias, atendiendo al uso de Internet, la percepción de los beneficios y riesgos de Internet y su estado de ánimo. Para ello, se realizó una encuesta online distribuida entre jóvenes con DI mayores de edad de distintas asociaciones pertenecientes a Plena Inclusión CV y alumnos/as del Programa Universitario de Formación para el Empleo de Jóvenes con Discapacidad Intelectual (UNINCLUV-2ª Edición) en la Universitat de València. Los resultados muestran cómo se ha incrementado el uso de Internet en ese periodo fundamentalmente en tareas de formación on-line, como se perciben be…

Technology for supporting web information search and learning in Sign Language

Sign Languages (SL) are underrepresented in the digital world, which contributes to the digital divide for the Deaf Community. In this paper, our goal is twofold: (1) to review the implications of current SL generation technologies for two key user web tasks, information search and learning and (2) to propose a taxonomy of the technical and functional dimensions for categorizing those technologies. The review reveals that although contents can currently be portrayed in SL by means of videos of human signers or avatars, the debate about how bilingual (text and SL) versus SL-only websites affect signers' comprehension of hypertext content emerges as an unresolved issue in need of further empi…

Information structure and practice as facilitators of deaf users' navigation in textual websites

Deaf users might find it difficult to navigate through websites with textual content which, for many of them, constitutes the written representation of a non-native oral language. With the aim of testing how the information structure could compensate for this difficulty, 27 prelingual deaf users of sign language were asked to search a set of headlines in a web newspaper where information structure and practice were manipulated. While practice did not affect deep structures (web content distributed through four layers of nodes), wide structures (web content concentrated in two layers) did facilitate users' performance in the last trial block and compromised it in the first trial block. It is…

Instrucción de estrategias de lectura digital mediante modelado por video

Los resultados de las pruebas de evaluación internacionales indican que las habilidades de lectura digital de nuestros adolescentes están por debajo de la media de los países de la OCDE. Este es el punto de partida del presente estudio, que analiza la efectividad de un programa de instrucción basado en la técnica del modelado por video a partir de movimientos oculares o EMMEs para la enseñanza de las estrategias de lectura en entornos digitales a un grupo de estudiantes de secundaria. Los resultados muestran que en términos generales los estudiantes que participaron en este programa aprendieron estrategias de lectura digital como la necesidad de planificar la búsqueda y la lectura, evaluar …

Towards text simplification for poor readers with intellectual disability: When do connectives enhance text cohesion?

Abstract Cohesive elements of texts such as connectives (e.g., but, in contrast) are expected to facilitate inferential comprehension in poor readers. Two experiments tested this prediction in poor readers with intellectual disability (ID) by: (a) comparing literal and inferential text comprehension of texts with and without connectives and/or high frequency content words (Experiment 1) and (b) exploring the effects of type and familiarity of connectives on two-clause text comprehension by means of a cloze task (Experiment 2). Neither the addition of high frequency content words nor connectives in general produced inferential comprehension improvements. However, although readers with ID wer…

Facilitar la Lectura Crítica en Internet

Pablo Delgado, Vicenta Ávila, Inmaculada Fajardo y Ladislao Salmerón (miembros de la ERI-Lectura de la Universitat de València) presentan los resultados de su investigación sobre lectura crítica en Internet en en las Jornades Lectura Fàcil de la Generalitat Valenciana organizadas por la ERI-Lectura de la Universitat de València el 18-19 mayo de 2018. http://ir.uv.es/4zhj7IR

Selection and evaluation of Internet information by adults with intellectual disabilities

Internet offers people with intellectual disabilities (ID) unique opportunities to access information and to participate in society. But concerns have been raised about the potential risks they face when accessing the Internet (e.g. giving credit to false information, being exposed to manipulative content). As part of the current debate between positive risk-taking and overprotection, our study empirically tested the extent to which 43 adults with ID identified and selected topically relevant as well as trustworthy web pages while searching the Internet for several topics (e.g. Can social networks use your pictures for advertisement?). Participants also justified their search decisions. Res…

Scanning and deep processing of information in hypertext: an eye tracking and cued retrospective think-aloud study

When students solve problems on the Internet, they have to find a balance between quickly scanning large sections of information in web pages and deeply processing those that are relevant for the task. We studied how high school students articulate scanning and deeper processing of information while answering questions using a Wikipedia document, and how their reading comprehension skills and the question type interact with these processes. By analyzing retrospective think-aloud protocols and eye-tracking measures, we found that scanning of information led to poor hypertext comprehension, while deep processing of information produced better performance, especially in location questions. Thi…

Training young adults with intellectual disability to read critically on the internet.

Background Young people with intellectual disability (ID) are becoming frequent Internet users, but they present difficulties selecting reliable Internet sources. Methods The present authors tested an instructional programme aimed at increasing skills to evaluate information from the Internet of 33 young adult students with intellectual disability enrolled in special needs education (19.4 years). The programme was composed of different web pages that provided conflicting views on a controversial topic. Students participated in small group discussions supported with Wh-question graphic organizers and contrasting cases during seven sessions. Results Differences between pre- and post-tests ind…