ABSTRACT

One of the hallmarks of skilled reading is the ease with which a person comprehends the meaning of a text. Much of the credit for this apparent effortlessness is traceable to the executive control processes that coordinate the functioning of the human cognitive system. Control functions are aspects of cognitive processes that contribute to the achievement of particular reading goals. One such control function is monitoring an ongoing component process in order to assure its successful completion. Another control function is the initiation of a different component process when the current goals of processing either are not being achieved or could be achieved more efficiently. These examples illustrate that executive control functions exhibit sensitivity during reading comprehension and they also have certain responsibilities. The sensitivity of the control system is a function of a reader’s goals (e.g., skimming for theme v. learning details), reader skill (e.g., the degree of automaticity of the component processes), and a text’s characteristics (e.g., its local coherence). This sensitivity can be seen operating by observing modulations in reading speed (e.g., Cirilo & Foss, 1980), gaze durations on individual words, and/or regressive fixations (see Just & Carpenter, 1980 for a discussion).