Information Design Journal - Volume 15, Issue 3, 2007

Discourse cohesion is presumably an important facilitator of comprehension when individuals read texts and hold conversations. This study investigated components of cohesion and language in different types of discourse about Newtonian physics: A textbook, textoids written by experimental psychologists, naturalistic tutorial dialoguebetween expert human tutors and college students, andAutoTutor tutorial dialogue between a computer tutor and students (AutoTutor is an animated pedagogical agent that helps students learn about physics by holding conversations in natural language). We analyzed the four types of discourse with Coh-Metrix, a software tool that measures discourse on different components of cohesion, language, and readability. The cohesion indices included co-reference, syntactic and semantic similarity, causal cohesion, incidence of cohesion signals (e.g., connectives, logical operators), and many other measures. Cohesion data were quite similar for the two forms of discourse in expository monologue (textbooks and textoids) and for the two types of tutorial dialogue (i.e., students interacting with human tutors and AutoTutor), but very different between the discourse of expository monologue and tutorial dialogue. Coh-Metrix was also able to detect subtle differences in the language and discourse of AutoTutor versus human tutoring.

Text coherence can be marked linguistically by using connectives and lexical signals that make coherence relations explicit. This study focuses on the influence of such markers on text comprehension in ecologically valid contexts. A first experiment shows how readers in a business meeting and in a laboratory study benefit from the explicit marking of coherence relations. A second experiment shows how poor readers in secondary education benefit from coherence marking while answering text comprehension questions. We argue in favor of an interaction between cognitively oriented research on discourse representation and document design research, to solve crucial questions like: how do we design optimally readable texts?

This paper reviews three studies that examined how users performance is affected by the (1) explicitness of local navigational links, (2) intriguing and informative phrasing of hyperlinks, and (3) text previews and navigational menus. The results reveal that sites with highly explicit navigational links increase site exploration as well as site perceptions; a mismatch between navigation and embedded link labels increases comprehension and site exploration; and previews with embedded links increase inferential comprehension, though they are disliked. We suggest a combined approach to structural cueing and emphasize that good design is context specific – designs that support comprehension do not necessarily receive high marks for usability.

An important objective of research in information design is the validation of methods that are available for the evaluation of public information. In this article three evaluation methods using verbal self-reports are compared: think aloud reader protocols, the plus-minus method and Focus (a software tool designed to collect reader responses on documents). The results of this comparison indicate that reader protocols produce better feedback on comprehension problems than the other two methods. In a series of experiments two aspects of reader protocols are further investigated in order to explain these results. The first factor is delay of feedback, which seems to result in fewer problem detections. The second factor is reading aloud, which may result in more problem detections. These experiments indicate that delay is the key factor. Finally an eye tracking study was done in order to analyze the effect on the reading process of reading aloud and giving comments. The results indicate that reading aloud causes a delay in the reading process and the task of giving comments increases the number of times readers look back in the text while reading.