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Updated: Jun 28, 2026

Using Eye Movements to Evaluate the Cognitive Processes Involved in Text Comprehension
Published on: January 10, 2014
Comprehension of expository text: insights gained from think-aloud data
Sandra Laing Gillam1, Jamison D Fargo, Kelli St Clair Robertson
1Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322, USA. sandi.gillam@usu.edu
Purpose:
To examine the kinds of explicit and implicit statements generated by school-age children with and without language impairments during comprehension of expository texts and to determine the relationship of these statements to comprehension performance.
Method:
Forty 4th-grade children with and without language impairments participated in individual think-aloud sessions (verbalizing thoughts aloud). During the sessions, children were asked to listen to expository passages 1 sentence at a time, make comments after each sentence, and then answer questions and recall the passages. The comments or verbal protocols that children generated during the think-aloud sessions were transcribed and analyzed. The relationship of verbal protocols to comprehension performance was evaluated.
Results:
Findings suggested that the ability to paraphrase passages was closely related to measures of expository text comprehension.
Conclusions:
The use of data obtained during think-aloud sessions may be useful to supplement information gained from traditional measures of comprehension for children with and without language impairments.
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