ABSTRACT
An increasingly popular measure in the study of reading comprehension is that of reading time, or inspection time, the time a reader takes to process a piece of verbal input. In constrast to the more commonly used recall measure, which assesses the results of comprehension, the reading time measure taps an aspect of the comprehension process as it occurs. For this reason, the study of reading times can contribute uniquely to growing understanding of comprehension processes. In contrast to conventional theories of comprehension, the computer simulation models of comprehension and the allied efforts in artificial intelligence are committed to describing at a general level and in great detail exactly what must be done in comprehension. Simulation models show a strong split between being stochastic or deterministic. Stochastic simulations explicitly include a random process that ensures that the behavior of the model is variable.
