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Summary of Current Research
Gary E. Raney

The goal of my research program is to understand the cognitive processes involved in language use by monolinguals and bilinguals, with particular emphasis on processes related to reading. Most of my research addresses three questions. Broadly construed, these are: What processes are involved in text comprehension? How are texts represented in memory? How does a reader know when information has been comprehended and learned? A rewarding aspect of studying language processing is that issues may be addressed from basic and applied perspectives. I take advantage of this by applying the outcomes of my research to education-related problems.

The majority of my research addresses critical issues related to how text is comprehended and represented in memory. Consider the following scenario as a practical example. Assume a college student and a 3^rd grade student each read an article about kangaroos and then read another article about economics. Will information contained in the kangaroo help the students understand the economics article? Probably not. Now assume the two articles share many words (e.g., the kangaroo passage could discuss the scarcity of food resources and population size as a function of resources and the economics passage could discuss the scarcity of financial resources and business size as a function of resources). Will reading the revised kangaroo article help the students understand the economics article? The answer is still “probably not” for the college student, but the 3^rd grader might benefit. My explanation is based on how the texts are represented in memory. Adults create more meaning-based representations whereas children often create more word-level representations. Because the meanings of the passages do not overlap, reading the kangaroo article is unlikely to help the college student comprehend the economics article regardless of whether the articles share words. If a child creates a word-level representation, the economics passage might be easier to read if it shares words with the kangaroo passage. That is, the child’s understanding of the kangaroo passage will transfer to the economics passage at the word level. I refer to the adult’s representation as context-dependent because information from one context (kangaroos) cannot be applied to a new context (economics). In contrast, the child represented the text in a context-independent manner—that is, information from one context can be applied to a second context.

I recently proposed a model (the context-dependent representation model) to explain how reading one text influences comprehension of a second text (Raney, 2003). The basic assumptions of the model are that the words (often referred to as the surface form) and their meanings (called the textbase) are represented in a context-independent manner, and that readers use their general understanding of the text (called the situation model) to bind the words and their meanings to the original context. In essence, comprehending a text produces a coherent representation in memory that ties information together. Information may be tied together at the situation model level, textbase level, or surface level. This model can be used to predict when reading one text will or will not help a reader understand a second text. One straightforward prediction is that reading one text will help the reader understand a second text if the two texts discuss similar issues. The model also leads to seemingly ironic predictions. For example, the model supports the prediction that not comprehending a text can increase its ability to influence how a second text is processed if the second text is about a dissimilar issue. Research from my own lab and other labs is producing support for this model.

A second area of my research program explores how readers evaluate their own learning from text. Consider the following situation as an example. Suppose you are about to take a test and a friend asks you if you are ready for the test. Depending on how well you think you learned the material, you will tell your friend that you expect to get an A, B, C, or D. Your prediction represents a metacomprehension judgment and the accuracy of your prediction reflects how well you can evaluate your own learning. It turns out that metacomprehension judgments are not very accurate. My research is aimed at determining whether readers can develop strategies for improving their metacomprehension judgments. In two of my studies (Raney & Murray, 2002; Raney, Anderson, Miura, Obeidallah, & Daniel, 2005), participants read a text, predicted performance on a quiz, then completed a quiz on the text (this was done for multiple texts.) Predictions were compared to actual performance on the quizzes. Participants also reported the strategies they used to make predictions. There were dramatic differences in prediction accuracy across subjects. Interestingly, more- and less-accurate participants reported using the same strategies. My current work is aimed at evaluating whether strategies were used effectively and whether self-monitoring processes take resources away from comprehension processes. It is possible that two readers could use the same evaluation strategies, but one reader has the cognitive capacity (e.g., working memory) to read and evaluate comprehension at the same time whereas another reader does not. That is, for some readers comprehension can actually be reduced when they focus on how well they comprehend a text! This is a fascinating possibility that I plan to pursue further. My long-term goal is to train poor comprehension monitors to adopt effective comprehension monitoring strategies.

A third area of my research program explores how prior knowledge influences text comprehension. Many teachers assume that helping students become aware of what they know or don’t know about a topic before reading a text will help the students decide what information to focus upon when reading the text. A common tool for highlighting prior knowledge is called an Anticipation Guide, which is like a pre-test. Anticipation guides are simple to use: Readers read a set of statements about a text before reading the text and indicate whether they agree or disagree with the statements, or don’t understand the statements. There is much schoolroom-based evidence that using anticipation guides improve comprehension. Importantly, how and why anticipation guides work has received little exploration. In conjunction with researchers from Learning Points Associates (formerly the North Central Regional Education Laboratory) in Chicago, I have addressed these issues. Preliminary data supports two conclusions. First, anticipation guides influence on‑line reading processes: Students modify their reading behavior when reading information that is consistent or inconsistent with their prior knowledge. Interestingly, students are more sensitive to information that is consistent with their prior knowledge than to information that is inconsistent with their prior knowledge. Second, text variables, such as text type (e.g., expository or narrative), and reader variables, such as interest in the topic, influence how reading behavior is modified. For instance, when reading personally relevant information from a narrative, readers might slow down when reading known information, whereas readers tend to speed up when reading known information in scientific-like texts. These results are being used to help design better reading instruction programs. In particular, one goal is to get grade-school age students to engage in active reading strategies.

In all of my research, I am interested in how monolinguals and bilinguals process and represent language. One important issue is the degree to which a bilingual’s two languages are integrated in memory. If bilinguals store their languages separately, then their languages should function separately. For example, when a Spanish speaker hears the Spanish word “pie” (which means foot), the English meaning (baked goods) should not be activated. Current evidence indicates that the English meaning is partially activated, which supports the conclusion that languages are partially integrated at the level of meaning. As a second example, if bilinguals store their languages separately, information learned in one language might be less accessible when attempting to retrieve the information in the second language (Raney, Atilano, & Gomez, 1996; Raney, Therriault, Minkoff, Varallo, Atilano, & Gomez, in preparation). This is referred to as language-dependent memory. The context-dependent representation model I mentioned earlier (Raney, 2003) can be used to explain language-dependent memory. According to my model, the language used could function as a contextual cue; therefore, information in memory can be contextually dependent on the language (also see Raney, Obeidallah, & Miura, 2002, Obeidallah & Raney, in press).

One of my goals is to apply my research to educational issues. As an example, according to my context-dependent representation model, the degree of context dependence may vary at each of level of representation (i.e., the surface level, the textbase level, or the situation level). The bilingual reading study mentioned above (Raney et al., in preparation) illustrates the implication of this point. An interesting aspect of this study was that we evaluated reading time for cognates (words that look alike, sound alike, and have the same meaning, such as problem and problema) and noncognates (words that look and sound different but have the same meaning, such as revenge and venganza). Cognates aided translation for non-fluent bilinguals, but not for fluent bilinguals. This can be explained as an emphasis on word-level processing relative to meaning-based processing for non-fluent bilinguals. A similar situation exists for beginning and skilled readers. Beginning readers focus on wording, whereas skilled readers focus on the gist. According to my model of text representation, beginning readers’ memories will be more context-independent in form because they emphasize word-level processes whereas skilled readers’ memories will be more context-dependent in form because they emphasize situation-level processes that serve to bind together information. Findings such as these have important educational implications. One implication is that novice second-language learners and poor readers both need training that will reduce the difficulty of processing individual words so that they can focus on the overall meaning of the material being read. This can be used to explain why rehearsing words in isolation leads to improved comprehension for beginning readers but not for advanced readers.

Our education system relies heavily on learning from text. As a result, understanding how text is organized in memory and how individuals monitor their comprehension are critical issues. My future research will be aimed at furthering our understanding of these topics as well as pursuing ways to apply the outcomes of my research directly to issues of educational importance.