Critical reading effort during text revision

This study concerns one of the processes involved in written verbal production: text revising. Our aim was to experimentally test the specificity of reading for revision as compared to reading for comprehension, and to determine the cognitive cost of initiating and performing critical-reading processes. A two-session experiment was conducted on students who had to perform a comprehension task and a revising task on a text presented in its basic version, or in a version containing either syntax errors or spelling errors. An analysis of the cognitive effort associated with critical-reading and comprehension-reading processes, and of the participants’ comprehension and revising performance, showed that critical reading was more effortful than comprehension reading. It showed also that critical reading was more effortful for the text version with syntax errors than with spelling mistakes. In addition, the working memory span of the readers/revisers had a different impact on effort and performance, depending on the type of errors in the text (spelling or syntax).