This study aimed to investigate the effect of character size and display style on reading rate when reading a sentence displayed on a computer screen (digital reading). The participants in this study were 21 university students with normal vision. Character sizes varied with heights of 0.7°, 1.1°, 1.7°, and 2.6°. Display conditions included Zoom, Reflow, Linear, and EP (Elicited Visual Presentation). In the Zoom condition, the reading rate was found to be lower for character sizes of more than 1.7°. However, in the Reflow, Linear, and EP conditions, the reading rate was not affected by character size expansion.

The present study investigates the effects of reading aloud with appropriate emotions on the reader's feelings. The participants in our series of experiments were university students. Two positive stories were selected through a pilot study. In order to identify the characteristics of reading aloud with appropriate emotions, the participants rated their impressions of reading with and without appropriate emotions in Experiment 1. The results indicated that reading aloud with appropriate emotions has the following four features: appropriate intonation, appropriate stress, use of voice tones that match the feelings of the story protagonists, and clear vocalization. In contrast, reading aloud without appropriate emotions only has the feature of clear vocalization. In Experiment 2, we hypothesized that only reading with appropriate emotions would elicit within the reader similar feelings to those portrayed in the story. This is because a reader needs to deeply understand the story content and protagonists' feelings in order to read aloud with appropriate emotions. We had participants read a positive story in two ways, either reading aloud with or without appropriate emotions, and rate their emotional states both before and after reading in each condition. The results of a 2 x 2 (manner of reading x period of test) within-subjects ANOVA revealed that participants only felt better after read a positive story aloud with appropriate emotions. We argue that this is because the manner of reading aloud with appropriate emotions functions as a kind of trigger for emotionally engaging a reader with a story and its protagonists.

This study seeks to identify whether the purpose of reading effects student writing; where the purpose for one group is to create a new story based on the Japanese story of Urashima Taro while the objective for another group is to both broaden and deepen their interpretations of Urashima Taro. The two groups both consisted of students attending a public school and students attending a school affiliated with a national university, and were, thus, the same apart from having different purposes and writing activities. Text mining analyses identified three key differences. The group assigned to create a new story (1) used a greater number of descriptive words, (2) exhibited greater overall variation in their word choices, and (3) used more words that were not present within the textbook containing the original story. These findings indicate that the group assigned with creating a new story tended to provide better quality responses than the group assigned to broaden and deepen their interpretations of Urashima Taro. Accordingly, it is possible to conclude that the students responded differently to the reading objectives and that had a significant impact on their writing.

This research investigated the development of skill of transferring the story to the problem solving in preschoolers. In Experiment 1, four- and five-year-old class children were first presented with an analog story that provided a solution to a problem, and then were asked to solve a problem with tools. In the attribution condition, the experimenter told the children the attributes of each tool. One of the tools presented had an attribute similar to that in the story. The results showed that children in the attribution condition could solve the problem better than children in the control condition, who were not told about the attributes of the tools. In Experiment 2, four-year-old class children performed two tasks (the easier one and the more difficult one) in a procedure similar to that in Experiment 1, except for the presentation: the experimenter relayed both the attributes and functions of the tools in another condition. found that the children in the attribution condition could solve an easier task. In addition, they could not solve the more difficult task in the attribution condition, but could do so in the attribution and function condition.