Effects of audio headings on learning.

Text-to-speech (TTS) programs often do a poor job of translating writing devices such as headings from visual into audio mode. Previous research studies have attempted to address this problem but these studies have mainly used heading detection tasks. The current study seeks to investigate (a) whether the presence of audio headings improves performance in natural learning tasks and (b) the type of heading rendering that is the most useful in natural learning tasks.

Learning from texts: activation of information from previous texts during reading.

Learning often involves integration of information from multiple texts. The aim of the current study was to determine whether relevant information from previously read texts is spontaneously activated during reading, allowing for integration between texts (experiment 1 and 2), and whether this process is related to the representation of the texts (experiment 2). In both experiments, texts with inconsistent target sentences were preceded by texts that either did or did not contain explanations that resolved the inconsistencies.

Communicating printed headings to the ear.

Two experiments compared three methods of translating printed headings into an auditory format. In both experiments, college students listened to a text with instructions to stop the recording whenever they heard a heading and type the hierarchical level and exact wording of the heading. Listeners were poor at identifying headings and their levels if the headings were not distinguished from the rest of the text.

Communicating headings and preview sentences in text and speech.

Two experiments tested the effects of preview sentences and headings on the quality of college students' outlines of informational texts. Experiment 1 found that performance was much better in the preview sentences condition than in a no-signals condition for both printed text and text-to-speech (TTS) audio rendering of the printed text. In contrast, performance in the headings condition was good for the printed text but poor for the auditory presentation because the TTS software failed to communicate nonverbal information carried by the visual headings.

Effects of Headings on Text Processing Strategies.

This experiment addressed the question of how headings influence readers' memories for text content. College students read and recalled a 12-topic expository text. Half of the participants were trained to construct a mental outline of the text's topic structure as they read and then use their mental outlines to guide their recall attempts.

Effects of Headings on Text Summarization.

A summarization task was used to study whether headings influence readers' representations of the topic structure of a text. College students (Experiments 1-3) and sixth- and eighth-graders (Experiment 3) summarized a multiple topic text that (a) included headings introducing every new subtopic, (b) included headings introducing half of the new subtopics, or (c) included no headings. In all experiments, topics were more likely to be included in a summary if they were signaled than if they were not signaled.