What Readers Have and Do: Effects of Students' Verbal Ability and Reading Time Components on Comprehension With and Without Text Availability

This study investigated the reading behavior of 15-year-old students while reading texts and answering corresponding multiple-choice questions. The availability of the texts during question answering was manipulated experimentally. Allocation of resources to several cognitive processes at the word, sentence, and text level was measured by decomposing word-by-word reading times in mixed-model analyses. Results showed that resource allocation was systematically related to measures of verbal ability and test performance. Students with higher verbal ability and better comprehension encoded infrequent concepts more carefully, spent more time on conceptual integration, and updated their situation model more carefully. In addition, reading time components associated with high-level integration processing proved more important when students were unable to reread the texts during question answering. This finding provides support for the claim that test performance without text availability is more sensitive to the quality of the mental representation that readers form online while reading.