Effects of titles on the processing of text and lexically ambiguous words:Evidence from eye movements

Providing titles for passages improves the comprehension and memorability o f text. Titles have generally been thought to facilitate comprehension at l ater stages of processing. Consistent with prior research, we found that pa ssages presented with titles were better recalled than those without titles . Furthermore, in Experiment 1, the presence of titles led to fewer regress ive eye movements, shorter end-of-sentence reading times, and shorter fixat ion times on target nouns. Experiments 2 and 3, using ambiguous target word s, indicated that except when a very infrequent sense of a word is required , titles provide a strong enough context to allow for ambiguous words to be processed as quickly as control words. The results of the three experiment s suggest that titles affect processing at both integrative and lexical. st ages of reading.