The Effects Of Signals In Cognitive Processes Of Text Reading

The effects of text signals have been a hot topic in the research of reading psychology in the West for last three decades,whereas the research of the effects of the text signals started lately in China. The research in this field has important theoretical significance and practical guiding significance for deeply understanding the essence of psychological processing in reading.The current studies on the effects of the text signals focus on the influence of the text signals on retaining text information, while other cognitive processes in text reading are rarely involved. Meanwhile, the materials mostly are presented by the whole article in the study of the effects of the text signals ,which can not avoid participants'reading-back; Secondly, free recall method are used in most study on the effects of the text signals on the retaining text information ,which has the strong subjective. At the same time, a study of Loch et al. indicated that the quality effect of the text signals is affected by the feature of the text itself. The difficulty of the articles is a factor influencing text reading. Therefore this research was conducted to explore the effect of the text signals on three cognitive processes including attention, recall and comprehension. Four experiments are employed to explore and discuss the effects of text signals in text reading.The pre-experiment applied two indicators--------reading time and the rate of the right answers to evaluate the difficulty of the texts. The results showed that Text Six was the most difficult text, Text Four was the easiest one.The first experiment was to explore the effect of text signals and the difficulty of text on attention by using dual-task paradigm. Comparing the reaction time to the sound stimuli of a variety of conditions, it revealed that text signals can improve readers'attention to signaled contents; the difficulty of the text can affect the readers'attention, whether for signaled content or un-signaled content, the difficult text is more attractive to the readers than the easy text in signal condition and non-signal condition.The second experiment changed the way that examined the subjects'recall, and used sentences filling method to confirm the effect of text signals on recall. The result indicated that text signals improved the retaining of the signaled sentences, but there was no effect to un-signaled sentences. Whether signaled sentences or un-signaled sentences were not influenced by the difficulty of the text, but the total recall performance was affected.The third experiment was to explore the effect of text signals on the reading comprehension through problem-solving Test. It revealed that text signals significantly promote problem solving, especially when the text is more difficult.This research showed that text signals promote readers'attention and retaining to the signaled contents, as well as problem solving through experiment study.