The importance of causal structure has been well documented in text comprehension research. This study investigates how both easy and difficult texts can be improved by repairing the causal structure and how causal structure repairs can differentially affect comprehension for more-and less-skilled readers. Following causal network theories of comprehension, principled and replicable types of repairs were made. Causal repairs consisted of (a) arranging text events in temporal order; (b) making implicit goals explicit; and (c) repairing coherence breaks caused by inadequate explanation, multiple causality, or distant causal relations. More-and less-skilled readers read revised and original versions of easy and difficult history texts. Results indicate that both more-and less-skilled readers benefited from the revisions but only for the difficult text. Causal network theories of comprehension provide an appropriate and systematic method for revising texts.Text comprehension cannot be understood completely without careful consideration of the way in which text structure and readers' cognitive processes interact. The formation of mental representations of texts is one such cognitive process that may depend on how the text is structured. Ideally, readers should form mental representations of texts because this level of understanding is conducive to long-term

The present study was designed to examine the developmental changes in the character-complexity and word-length effects when reading Chinese script. Character complexity was defined in two ways: (1) the number of constituent strokes for characters (Experiment 1), and (2) the number of constituent radicals for characters (Experiment 2). The word length was defined as the number of characters in words (Experiment 3). The three experiments involved a lexical recognition task, and the participants consisted of 25 second graders, 24 fourth graders, 24 sixth graders, and 25 university students. In Experiment 1, it was found that the response latencies increased with the number of strokes in characters for second graders, whereas no effects were evident for fourth graders, sixth graders, or university students. In contrast, in Experiment 2 no character-complexity effect was found for the number of radicals. In Experiment 3, only a partial word-length effect was found for the number of characters for second graders. These results suggest that beginning Chinese readers process characters in an analytical way, but that the decoding process changes gradually from analytic to holistic as their reading skills develop. The educational implication of this result is discussed.

When I agreed to do an article that would capture the essence of my research, I did not realize how hard it would be. What made the task difficult was that I was not sure how to write the article in an interesting way. I thought a descriptive narrative of my work might be about as interesting as reading the phone directory. As I considered this problem, I realized that a presentation of my work against the backdrop of the history of reading and writing might be appealing. This history could take the long view as well as the short view.The long view is driven by the fact that I have studied the history of writing, and this history can be traced back thousands of years. The short view is driven by the fact that although my research on reading goes back only 40 years, during this short span of time academic psychology has gone through three paradigm shifts. Additionally, the field of reading has experienced some important wars (captured in the title of Chall's, 1967, classic book Learning to Read: The Great Debate). What follows, then, is a brief overview of the history of writing as well as a description of my work on fluency. A history of writing is included because it reflects my personal view on this important aspect of reading.