Feeding the information eaters: Suggestions for integrating pure and applied research on language...

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Instructional Science 7 (1978) 249-312 © Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in the Netherlands

FEEDING THE INFORMATION EATERS: SUGGESTIONS FOR INTEGRATING PURE AND APPLIED RESEARCH ON

LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION

PATRICIA WRIGHT*

Medical Research Council, Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge CB2 2EF, England

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the current relation between pure and applied research on the comprehension of written information. It finds few points of contact. The suggestion is put forward that greater interaction could be mutually profitable. An information flow among researchers is proposed that starts with applied solutions to practical problems, continues through pure explanations of why these solutions are successful, and so enables the refinement of the original applied solutions. Because such an information flow begins with applied solutions, some of the problems of systematizing the findings of applied research are discussed. There can never be an applied theory of communication that specifies precisely how to design written information. Therefore a proposal is put forward for applying "quali ty-control" procedures to the preparation of documents. Such procedures indicate that several different kinds of research are necessary for determining the content, optimising the format and evaluating the effectiveness of written communications. The desirability of interactions among those who carry out these different kinds of research is discussed. Finally, the criteria for evaluating research in general are considered. The categorisation of particular studies as either useful or useless is found to be inappropriate.

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* Thanks are due to Drs John Morton and John Marshall both for providing the incentive to put these thoughts in writing and for their advice and encouragement during the preparation of the paper. Many helpful comments on an earlier draft were received from Dr Arnold Wilkins, Dr James Hartley and Michael Macdonald-Ross. These were all much appreciated, even though some may appear not to have been implemented directly.

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Contents

I. Introduction 1.1. The scope and objectives of this paper 1.2. Dichotomies and dimensions in psychological research 1.3. Digestive problems for the information eater 1.4 Pure and applied approaches to comprehension

2. Comprehension versus communication: the relation between two research fields 2.1. Differences in the texts studied 2.2. Differences in the populations studied 2.3. Differences in the reader's task

2.3.1. Reading for retention 2.3.2. Reading for speed

2.4. Differences in the use of computers 2.5. Summary

3. Why encourage interactions between pure and applied research? 3.1. Who would benefit? 3.2. Generalizing across materials 3.3. Generalizing across comprehension strategies

3.3.1. Active and passive strategies 3.3.2. The use of imagery and other short cuts

3.4. The role of cognitive applied psychology 4. Some applications of pure research on comprehension

4.1. An application to leaflets 4.2. An application to forms 4.3. An application to warnings and prohibitions 4.4. Applications to instructions 4.5. An application to Yes/No questions 4.6. The application of clause sequencing

5. The problems of developing applied theories 5.1. The need for taxonomies 5.2. Quality control approaches to information design

5.2.1. Finding out what the reader wants to know 5.2.2. Finding out how to tell the reader 5.2.3. Finding out if the communication works

5.3. Strategic and tactical issues in research on communication 6. Obstacles to interactions between pure and applied research

6.1. Is comprehension a special case? 6.2. Pure and impure research 6.3. Util i ty as a dimension of research

7. References

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1. Introduction

Invest in applied science for quick returns (the spiritual message runs), but in pure science for capital appreciation. And so we make a special virtue of encouraging pure research in, say, cancer institutes or institutes devoted to the study of rheuma- tism or the allergies - always in the hope, of course, that the various lines of research, like the lines of perspective, will converge somewhere upon a point. But there is nothing virtuous about it. We encourage pure research in these situations because we know no other way to go about it. If we knew of a direct pathway leading to the solution of the clinical problem of rheumatoid arthritis, can anyone seriously believe that we should not take it? (Medawar, 1967, p. 137).

1.1. THE SCOPE AND OBJECTIVES OF THIS PAPER

Chapanis (197 l) has drawn attention to the growing volume of research on problems of human communication. Such studies are increasing both in absolute number and in the proportion of research effort devoted to them by behavioural scientists. The present paper will be concerned with only a small fragment of this total research area. It will be concerned with studies of language comprehension, particularly the comprehension of written language. Within this domain the objective of the paper is to explore the relation between pure and applied research. During the past twenty years there have been advances both in basic understanding of the psychological processes mediating comprehension (e.g. the work by psycholinguists) and also advances in the techniques of improving the effectiveness of communication (e.g. the work of educational technologists). However the problems raised here are more general than the specific issues of what do readers do when they read and how can you encourage them to do more of it, The present discussion is simply one way of exploring the relation between pure and applied research in the behavioural sciences. What relationship exists at present? What other kinds of relationship would be possible and what would be the pros and cons of these alternatives?

There are at least three commonly held divergent schools of thought on the ideal relation between pure and applied studies, One approach sees successful application as dependent upon advances in basic knowledge. This belief has had a very long history and can indeed be traced back to Bacon (1620) in Novum Organum. Although Bacon's concern was to counteract the prevailing utilitarian approach to experimentation in the seventeenth century, he did so by arguing for the greater utility of "pure" research: "Is truth ever barren? Shall he the pursuer of truth not be able thereby to produce worthy effects and endow the life of man with infinite commodities?" (Brit- tanica, 1952, p. 895). This attitude can be found reflected in the thinking of the British Science Research Councils. For example, the Secretary of the Medical Research Council has recently written, "I personally have a strong

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conviction that the studies that we support, for example, in molecular and development biology, . . . are providing us with the basic information which is going to help us make an impact on the diseases the causes of which are not even known in principle at the moment" (Gowans, 1978).

This view may be appropriate for some kinds of diseases, but the generality has been contested in several ways (e.g. Olson, 1975). It is easy to point to areas where the level of analysis of the pure research makes it impossible to recover the information necessary for correct predictions about a higher or more global level of analysis. For example, a knowledge of the physiology of digestion cannot be applied either to teaching infants to feed themselves or to teaching cooks how to prepare appropriate foods. All are concerned with the behaviour termed eating, but in quite different ways. Rothkopf (1972) has suggested that an analogy can be drawn between man as a meat-eater and as an information-eater - hence the title of this article. The present concern is to find what sort of research would most help to feed the information eaters.

An alternative to the Baconian viewpoint is advanced by those who see applied research as the ideal starting point for the development of basic theories, particularly theories of human cognition. For example, Broadbent (1971) cites Sir Frederic Bartlett as an influential proponent of this approach. Broadbent then goes on to give his own interpretation of this same viewpoint. Similarly Chapanis (1971, p. 950) affirms, "You see, it is my firm belief that the best basic work in psychology starts not with psychological theory but with attempts to solve questions posed by the world around us". Certainly this approach has met with considerable success. Many research areas of theoretical importance have entered the laboratory from real world problems (see for example Broadbent, 1965; Baddeley, 1977). But in the discussion which follows it will be suggested that this one-way interaction may not always be adequate for providing practical solutions to real problems. The researcher who starts with a real problem, but extracts only some of the critical variables to take back for examination in the laboratory, may very well find difficulties in moving from the laboratory findings back into the problem domain. This difficulty was fully recognised by Chapanis (1967), but it constitutes the main reason for our wanting to find an alternative relation between the two research approaches.

A third view of pure and applied research is to consider them separate but equal. The adherents of such an approach would point out that the two kinds of research tackle essentially different problems. Therefore it appears that interaction between the two is unnecessary. Perhaps the most influential proponent of this view has been Skinner (e.g., Skinner, 1950). Although Skinner was specifically considering tlle relation between learning and teaching, nevertheless in section 2 it will be shown that such a viewpoint appears to

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characterize much of the experimental research that has been done on people's understanding of written language.

In this paper a fourth viewpoint will be put forward. It will be suggested that a flow of information from applied to pure and back to applied could be a very fruitful pattern of interaction, at least in the human behavioural sciences. Far from being a novel proposal, it can be seen from what has already been said that this simply combines two of the already well established views of the relation between pure and applied research. What is gained by such combination? Is it necessary or even practical? In seeking to answer such questions in the context of research on language, possible limitations on the generality of the conclusions drawn must be borne in mind. The choice of written language as the topic is in part for- tuitous. It is an area in which both pure and applied work is well known to the present author. However, this choice of topic is also fortunate for several reasons. Both pure research by psycholinguists and applied research by educational technologists developed rapidly during the early sixties (e.g. Miller, 1962; De Cecco, 1964). The potential for interaction between the two approaches was at least temporally present. There were no chronological reasons for the two developing independently in isolation from each other. Moreover, both approaches professed to be concerned with what, super- ficially at least, appeared to be the same problem, namely comprehension. Reviewing work on experimental psycholinguistics Johnson-Laird (1974) wrote "The fundamental problem in psycholinguistics is simple to formulate: what happens when we understand sentences?" The corresponding view for applied research has been put by Freedle and Carroll (1972, p. 366). "How could the language perceiver be motivated to attend to the message or to its salient features?" The pure scientist asks how does comprehension come about. The applied scientist asks how can comprehension be brought about. Such a close relation between research objectives might be expected to generate numerous interactions between pure and applied researchers. This topic of comprehension is therefore very appropriate for asking questions such as whether in the past twenty years such interactions have occurred? And if not, why not?

There are many other psycholinguistic issues (e.g. language production) and practical problems (e.g. acquiring language skills) which will not be considered here, because the field of written communication is broad enough for our present purposes. This area includes the design of handbooks, educational texts, leaflets and forms. In this area the basic psychological issues are concerned with the processes by which readers come to understand what they read.

One advantage of taking the topic of written communication is that it is one from which examples can easily be drawn of the various relations that

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can exist between pure and applied research. There are a number of Baco- nians who have taken pure research findings and tried applying them. Others, rather fewer, have taken applied research findings and tried explaining them. Some cautionary tales of the successes and failures of both approaches will be discussed in section 4.

The separate-but-equal approach implies that the opt imum strategy for solving practical problems is to derive theoretical formulations at a wholly "applied" level. In section 5 some of the problems that delay the development of such applied models will be discussed. Why is it that after many years o fresearch, so little progresshas been madein the development of specifications for designing written communications so that they are easily understood? As one route to a possible solution, the use of a three stage "quali ty control" procedure for document design will be illustrated and discussed. Such a procedure could provide a framework for the integration of pure and applied reserach.

Finally, in section 6, the discussion will return to the more general issues of the relation between pure and applied research. Has this relation been distorted by focussing on the problems of language comprehension or do the terms themselves encourage value judgments that raise barriers to interaction between different researchers? Should such terms be replaced or just bet ter understood? Will we ever know how to feed the information eaters?

1.2. DICHOTOMIES AND DIMENSIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH

In many respects it is an oversimplification to classify research as either pure or applied. In practice the distinction between pure and applied work is not so much a dichotomy as a dimension where boundaries are blurred and the categorization of particular studies may be as much a matter of emphasis as of unequivocal criteria. Evidence of the difficulty of making such distinctions can be seen in a discussion of terms such as Engineering Psychology and Human Performance (e.g. Alluisi and Morgan, 1976). The first people to use the phrase applied experimental psychology were Chapanis et al. (1949). With our present focus on human communication such a phrase is perhaps too general. Our concern is with a sub-field of human cognition, but even within such a limited domain it can be seen that a simple d ichotomy between pure and applied research is inappropriate. At the pure end of the pure -appl ied dimension is cognitive psychology (e.g. Massaro, 1975). Here the research interest focusses on increasing man's knowledge about cognitive processes in general. It is a bonus if this knowledge can be applied. No at tempt is made by the researchers themselves to promote such applications. Further along the dimension is applied cognitive

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psychology, a term coined by Baddeley (1977). Emphasis is on the second adjective cognitive. Here the research interest starts with a practical problem but focusses on isolating the underlying psychological processes. Only inter- mittently are such researchers concerned to develop solutions to practical problems. Further still along the dimension is research which has been termed cognitive applied psychology by Baddeley (1977). Here the emphasis is on the word applied. Such research sometimes overlaps with areas which are elsewhere known as human factors research or ergonomics. The phrase cognitive ergonomics aptly distinguishes our present concern from the more general field of ergonomics (Sime, personal communication). This is the practical problem solving end of the pure-applied dimension. Here the research usually focusses on the task environment. The major concern of such research is to discover changes in the environment which will enhance cognitive performance. The cognitive processes mediating such performance are of no more concern here than the physiology of digestion is of concern to the cook. Examples of research on human communication at many different points along the pure-applied dimension can be found in Kolers et al. (1978).

The distinction between applied cognitive psychology and cognitive applied psychology was illustrated by Rothkopf (1972) in exploiting the analogy between meat-eaters and information-eaters. He suggested that much psycholinguistic research is analogous to studying how indigestible are certain small pieces of textual information. He pointed out that such research may assist in detecting communication problems but may not go much beyond this. It does not inevitably indicate how to cure such problems. Such research can be contrasted with that undertaken by psychologists who are interested in practical problems of communication. Rothkopf suggested that research on the ability of students to learn from prose materials was analogous to studying daily weight gain in relation to a particular feeding programme. This research strategy would seem to hold the greater promise for discovering how to make information more digestible. But is any interaction between the two approaches either necessary or desirable?

Arguing by analogy can be a risky business, but before turning to a firmer basis for discussion it is interesting to note that Rothkopf's analogy can also be used to illustrate one of the ways in which the interchange between pure and applied research can be profitable. For example, pure research on metabolic processes was able to refine a practical dietary solution to the problem of rickets. It was known that cod-liver oil would prevent this disease long before it was established what the critical deficiency was, namely vitamin D. Once this critical factor had been isolated then it was realized that ultraviolet light and therefore sunlight, would also prevent the malformation of bone tissues. Here a knowledge of the underlying processes enabled a dietary solution to be refined. However, it is most unlikely that

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such a knowledge would have been capable of producing any solution if the problem had been tackled from that end in the first instance. The complexity of the problem is just too great. In the discussion to follow, it will be suggested that similar profitable interactions between different research approaches might be found in studies of the psychology of language. Applied research may isolate design factors which improve communication. Then basic research on underlying processes may offer explanations of why these design factors are so effective. The communicators will then be able to refine their own design solutions in the light of this knowledge. From applied research to pure research and back to applied solutions it will be suggested could be the most beneficial information flow along the pure-appl ied dimension. The hazards arising from other information flows will be illustrated in section 3.

1.3. DIGESTIVE PROBLEMS FOR THE INFORMATION EATER

Focussing the present discussion on the problems of written communication has the advantage that the magnitude of the practical problem is easily demonstrated. In Britain, in 1975, the government sponsored Medical Research Council circulated the following sentence to all members of their non-clinical scientific staff:

In order to provide for transfer of accrued rights under this scheme to an alternative superannuation scheme of the Institution with a view to the acquisition for those whose rights are transferred of rights under such alternative superannuation scheme and for the allowance of transfer credits (as defined in the Social Security Act 1973) the Institution shall have power with the consent of the member and of the Central Council at any time before the member attains the prescribed age to transfer the fund to the trustees of such alternative superannuation scheme freed and discharged from all the Trusts powers and provisions of this scheme to the intent that the fund shall be held by the Trustees of such alternative superannuation scheme upon the Trusts of and in accordance with the provisions of such alternative superannuation scheme from time to time in force.

Certainly there may be a number of reasons why legal language looks like this. Some of the reasons may be historical, others may be logistic. The language itself is a specialized form of communication devised primarily for use by a sophisticated audience, namely lawyers. It contains both jargon (e.g. transfer credits) and a sentence structure that differs both in length and complexity from everyday English. In both respects it is comparable to many other specialized language forms, such as ALGOL and other computer languages, which can be understood only after certain preliminary training has been received. But there are two big differences between computer language and legal jargon. One difference is that it is much more difficult to acquire the specialized training necessary for decoding legal language.

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Local bookshops may stock several teach yourself programming guides but generally have little that will help the layman to crack the legal code. In view of this the second difference between the two types of communication is perhaps surprising. Whereas computer languages are reserved for special purposes, the lawyer's language is often transmitted directly to the general public. The assumption seems to be made that although a specialized language it is nevertheless comprehensible to native English speakers. This was well illustrated with the example quoted above. The 143 word sentence was not merely being offered as an explanation. The scientists receiving the information were required to sign that they agreed with it. Some cautious folk wanted to understand what they were signing. Helpfully the Medical Rese- arch Council made available translations of the sentence for those who re- quested it. Question: Why couldn't the translation have been circulated instead of the incomprehensible version? Answer: The sentence had been written by Learned Council, so it was not to be tampered with. Happily not everyone takes this view. In the United States, President Carter has set up a working group whose brief is the simplification of legal language (Leapman, 1978). The American successes include reducing a 250 word paragraph to

just 30 words. Perhaps in the United Kingdom such things take just a little longer. It

was over 10 years ago that two groups of British researchers independently explored the usefulness of novel displays such as flow charts for explaining " i f . . . then . . ." material to the general public (Lewis et al., 1967; Wason, 1968). No doubt there are a variety of special reasons (political, economic, organisational and logistic) why these findings have had little impact on the use of legal prose. Elsewhere, however, alternatives to prose are increasingly being used. The British Department of Employment has used flow charts in training booklets (e.g. Jones, 1968). The Squash Rackets Association approv- ed a guide to the rules of squash which was written as a decision tree al- gorithm (Coe, 1977). So it would be misleading to imply that nothing at all is happening to aid the digestion of written information. Nevertheless obscure communications are all too easy to find in both the public and the private sectors.

The previous example may have appeared extreme but similar illustrations have been cited by Chapanis (1965), Broadbent (1977), Wright (1977). Often the financial implications of poor communications go unrecognised. In an attempt to draw industry's attention to the problem, the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators issued a press release in which they cited an example of deficiencies in the support documentation for mounting a valve. The muddled information resulted in the need to scrap en expensive component. The cost of rectifying the problem came to £800, although the valve itself had cost only £25. Even relatively cheaper components require that adequate instructions should accompany them.

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The Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators feel that occurrences such as the example just cited are only the tip of the iceberg. They suggest that the aggregate cost of many smaller communication failures probably far exceeds that of the more widely publicised disasters. This seems likely to be true if you consider the area of Government forms. A management services handbook on Forms Control, issued in 1975 by the Civil Service Department, estimated that the cost in paper alone was around £ 14 million with the administrative and labour costs being something in the order of 20-25 times the cost of production (HMSO, 1975, p. 2). This would give the total cost in 1975 as being some £364 million. Assuming a ten percent rise in costs per year since then, the 1978 estimate must be closer to £500 million. If just one percent of this figure could be saved by improvements in the language and layout of the information this represents a saving of £5,000,000 each year.

Certainly there appears to be room for reducing the errors made by people completing forms. With the implementation of the Consumer Credit Act 1974, a number of companies were required to apply to the Office of Fair Trading for a licence. The Times newspaper reported that between 25 and 33 percent of the applications received by the Office of Fair Trading were invalid because of errors in completing documentation or failure to send the correct fee. It is always the form-fillers' fault? Probably not. Levels of literacy or intelligence of the applicants were unlikely to have been the source of the confusions among such applicants. Elsewhere in government it has been recognised that the source of confusion may be in the written information itself.

In February 1978 the British Parliamentary Commissioner for ad- ministration (known elsewhere in Europe as the Ombudsman)instructed the Ministry of Transport to return £4 million to motorists who had mis- understood a notice issued in March 1977 by the Driver and Vehicle Licens- ing Centre, Swansea. The intention of the notice had been to inform people about the amount of excise duty payable when renewing vehicle licences. The notice said, "If the rate of tax is changed in the budget, the new rate must be paid." Vehicle licences expire on the last day of the month but can be renewed 14 days before or after this date. Budget day was 29 March 1977, so some of the people who read the notice thought that it meant that they would have to send some extra money if they renewed their licence before budget day and then the rate of excise duty was increased. So they delayed renewing the licence until after budget day, in order to be able to pay with a single cheque. Other readers thought that as long as they renewed their licences before the budget that was the end of the matter. In the budget the road tax was increased by £10, so many of those who had delayed renewing their licence now sent in the higher amount. Consequently two different rates were being paid for the same vehicle licence. The ombudsman

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ruled that the wording of the notice had been ambiguous and that readers had been misled into paying too much tax. The administrative costs of making the refunds are not yet publicly known, but the Ministry estimates that up to 600,000 motorists may be eligible for a refund. In postage alone this could cost £42,000. To this figure must be added the cost of the nation- wide publicity campaign mounted in March 1978, telling motorists how to claim their refund. Certainly the cost of misinformation can be considerable.

But there is nothing special about the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Centre that its notices should cause misundertandings. The following is an excerpt from the notes section on the back of a form currently being used by the Eastern Electricity Board in the United Kingdom:

If the meter for any reason has not been read on behalf of the Board at the relevant time the number of units supplied in the period concerned between the hours specified for the reduction of the rate of unit charge as aforesaid and the number of units supplied in that period at other times will be estimated having regard to the previous or subsequent registrations.

If you think that you know what this means is it because you are already familiar with the system of estimating charges that the Electricity Board uses? The comprehension problems facing a visitor to this country, particularly someone whose first language is not English, must be very considerable indeed.

The two examples quoted here at length have illustrated comprehension problems which arise, technically, within a single sentence (!). When larger quantities of text are considered the problems of maintaining comprehension become even greater. Probably we have all read instruction leaflets that just didn't make sense. Hartley and Burnhill (1977b) presented an example of how a two-page leaflet about subscriptions, issued by the British Psychol- ogical Society, was so difficult to understand that 400 standing order pay- ments did not contain sufficient information to assign payment to a particular member. It was necessary to write to banks for clarification. So it actually cost the Society money to correct the mistakes generated by their explanatory leaflet.

Educational texts are often designed with rather more care. In particular the Media Development Group of the Open University in Britain has won several prizes for its handling of novel complex design problems. This is a University which does most of its teaching through correspondence texts distributed by post. Nevertheless the Open University's own Institute of Educational Technology has shown that the product is not above criticism, even at the level of typographic decisions. For example, Macdonald- Ross and Waller (1975, p. 9) write: "In one course . . . no less than 18

d i f f e r e n t t y p e ( f o n t ) variations were counted , toge ther wi th f o u r d i f f e r en t

k inds o f rule . . . . R a t h e r than clari fying the s t ruc ture o f the tex t , in s o m e

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cases the typography only complicates it further." No doubt it would be possible to find similar examples of comprehension difficulty caused not by the layout but by the language itself. Even details such as selecting a page size that would go through letter-boxes appears to have been left out of the original decision-making for these texts. All of which just goes to show that even well-designed education materials may leave room for improvement.

This is only a thumb-nail sketch of the kinds of digestive problems that information eaters encounter. Yet even here it is clear that there are two rather different sources of difficulty. On the one hand there are problems arising from the linguistic structures of sentences. On the other hand there are problems arising from presentation factors, from the way the information is displayed on the page. It might be tempting t o think that pure research would be concerned with the language factors and applied research would concentrate on the typographic issues. If this were so then the solutions to practical problems of written communication would require nothing more than the summation of the two sets of research findings. Together these would provide adequate guidelines both on what to say and how to say it.

However, this is an oversimplified characterization of the differences between the pure and applied approaches to comprehension. It distorts both approaches in the direction of mutual compatibility. In fact the disparity between the two approaches is so great that there may be no way in which to combine the different research findings. We will examine the details of this disparity more closely in section 2.

1.4. PURE AND APPLIED APPROACHES TO COMPREHENSION

Garner (1972) has noted that in general pure and applied research studies tend to use rather different methodologies. The applied is often observational and field based. The pure is intervensionist and laboratory based. However, most experimental psychologists interested in comprehension, whether pure or applied, share a research paradigm in which the effects of manipulating variables prior to reading are monitored via performance during and after reading. Figure 1 attempts to characterize this communality in terms of the boxes labelled 1 and 2. These boxes indicate some of the independent variables (such as materials, subject population and reading goals) and also some of the performance measures (such as subjective judgments, retention, comprehension) which can be considered by experimenters. The difference between pure and applied research is represented by the two alternative links between the performance measures and the antecedent conditions. One linkage is labelled Theories of WHEN, following the usage of Macdonald-Ross (1978). This is intended to represent the concern of the applied psychologist for specifying the conditions under which certain relations between the variables denoted in boxes 1 and 2 can be ex-

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\

\ \" t \...

/ Theories of WHEN /

Functional mappin 9 between antecedents of readincj and performance

/ Theories of HOW / l

Chan9es in Changes in the readinq representation strategy of information in memory

Fig. 1. pected to occur. For example, a concern with when a particular structuring of the text may improve retention. The other linkage between boxes 1 and 2 is labelled Theories of HOW. This is intended to represent the pure psychologist's concern with underlying mechanisms and processes.

For reasons of space, Fig. 1 makes no at tempt to amplify the factors in each of the boxes. Nevertheless it must be realised that a label such as text materials stands for a multiplicity of variables, including both linguistic and display factors. It necessarily covers both variations in subject matter and variations in the way particular contexts are structured. Similarly subject population variables will include both the factors of general level of cognitive ability and the degree of specific knowledge appropriate for the text or reading task. Reading goals too can be seen as clearly different in reading activities such as browsing, skimming and studying. A telephone directory is not read in the same way as a newspaper or a cooking recipe, because what the reader wants to get from his reading is very different in each case.

The performance measures which are listed briefly in box 2 can be similarly expanded but perhaps are more self-evident. There is not just one kind of comprehension, but several. The comprehension of an abstraction, such as what caused a particular historic event, is quite different from the comprehension of a procedure, such as how to tie a knot. Similarly there are qualitatively different kinds of retention. The short-term retention of textual material that has no personal relevance to the reader is quite different from the long-term retention of information that is integrated with knowledge the reader already has. For example, it is likely that you remember from the previous section that the United States has a committee trying to simplify legalistic language. It is much less likely that you remember how

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many words there were in the quoted explanation of pension rights. The subject matter of the text will usually determine what kind of retention is relevant. But different kinds of retention may be found for the same text when it is read by people with different interests. This illustrates an important factor which is not clearly brought out in Fig. 1, namely the inter- dependence of the factors in the two boxes. Neither pure nor applied research has any option but to specify the comprehension of what, by whom and for what purpose.

The present discussion will be concerned only with research on cognitive aspects of communication. There are other measurable effects of readers' interactions with written information, which will not be considered here. Attitude change is an example of one such effect. In some instances the affective tone of a communication, its tendency to persuade or to alienate, may be far more important than its cognitive content. This has implications for the adequacy of any applied theory of communication which might be developed, but its inclusion is not central to our present purpose of examining the relation between pure and applied research on comprehension. Readers interested in pursuing this aspect of communication are referred to the relevant chapters in the Handbook by Pool et al. (1973).

Given the different sub-groups of factors denoted in boxes 1 and 2 of Fig. 1, it is not surprising that differences between pure and applied approaches to comprehension have arisen partly from differences in the selections made of variables from these boxes. This selectivity itself arises from differences in research objectives. As has already been pointed out pure research is primarily concerned with the development of theoretical constructs concerning the processes underlying comprehension. For example there are theories which specify how the information from a sentence is represented in memory and how that information can be used either to answer questions (e.g. Clark, 1972) or to map the correspondence between a sentence and a picture (e.g. Carpenter and Just, 1975). This aspect of pure research is schematically represented by the box labelled Theories of HOW in Figure 1. This box is depicted as having a much stronger link to the various performance measures than to the antecedent conditions itemised in box 1. The justification for representing the linkage in this way, and the implications that such asymmetry has for both pure and applied research, will become clearer in the following sections.

The applied approach has often attempted to forge strong links between performance measures and variables existing prior to the encounter with written information. Although in Figure 1 these links are schematically represented by the box labelled Theories of WHEN, the term theory may be inappropriate here since hypothetical constructs are not necessarily involved. Instead, the theories are a systematization of known functional relations between performance after reading and specified variables known to exist

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before reading. For example, theories of WHEN may contain statements such as: Students ' retention improves when the reading material is followed by questions about the content of what was read. Such functional statements can obviously be refined and elaborated with respect to the variables in both boxes 1 and 2. Glaser and Resnick (1972) review much of this work on the value of questions. Nevertheless the point to observe is that such functional statements are akin to a " theory of cooking" which specifies that if an egg is boiled for 10 minutes it will be hard enough to slice for sandwiches. Explanations of why the egg solidifies are not the concern of Theories of WHEN. They are to be found in Theories of HOW. At their most successful, Theories of WHEN may resemble taws (such as Boyle's law) in that performance changes brought about by reading can be accurately predicted from a knowledge of the appropriate antecedent conditions. More typically in practice the contents of the Theories of WHEN box seem to be an accumulation of statements about the conditions in which performance is improved or impaired (e.g. Tinker, 1963; Spencer, 1969; Jenkins, 1976). Some of the problems of organizing such statements so that they can be applied to practical problems will be taken up again in section 5.

To capture a stronger feel for the way the two theoretical boxes provide quite different research objectives let us consider two studies, in both of which the experimenters were concerned with the comprehension of conjunctive and disjunctive information (if A and B then . . . , if A or B then . . .). Adopting an applied approach Wright and Reid (1973) contrasted four quite different ways of presenting complex conjunctions and disjunctions. They built on the work of Wason (1968), Jones (1968) and Lewis et al. (1967). Consequently the alternatives included not only prose, but also flow charts, list structures and two-dimensional tabulations. Such alternatives are expansions of the factor labelled Text in Fig. 1. Two different user populations were simulated by varying the amount of extraneous information in the problem. The assumption was that a naive user population would not clearly differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information whereas a sophisticated user population would. If true, this implies that the same car maintenance handbook might need to be formatted differently for the Do-it-Yourself enthusiast and for the trained garage mechanic. Different goals were explored by having people either refer to the information directly while solving problems or memorise the information and then apply it to the problems. In short the study used a multi-factorial approach to explore the functional relationship between box 1 and box 2. Wright and Reid found that there was no uniquely optimal format. The novice would be bet ter with the flow chart; the sophisticated user performed best with the two-dimensional table; the list structure was easier to remember, etc.

Such an approach has little in common with that of pure researchers such as Trabasso et al. (1971). These investigators were also concerned with

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the comprehension of complex conjunctions and disjunctions. They took one kind of text (sentences), one kind of reader (students), one kind of reading goal (the task was to say whether the sentence correctly described a picture). Trabasso et al. were able to formulate a model of the information processing stages whereby the task could be carried out. This model in its turn has proved to be very influential. It has been used and modified by other theorists interested in the comprehension of different kinds of sentences (e.g. affirmatives and negatives - Clark and Chase (1972); actives and passives - Glucksberg et al. (1973), etc.). But although the model has yielded useful insights for pure research on comprehension, it has relatively little to say to the applied researcher. It accounts for why people have more problems understanding disjunctions than conjunctions, but gives no guidelines on how to communicate disjunctive information.

If we return to the earlier simplistic suggestion that practical problems of written communicat ion can be solved by combining the pure and applied approaches, perhaps it is now clearer why this is difficult to do. The accounts of comprehension processes developed by psycholinguists do not map into the variables which applied psychologists find to be the most powerful determinants of comprehension. Applied psychologists do not just want to know why certain sentences are difficult. They are also interested in knowing why flow charts, for example, are sometimes easier to understand than sentences. And also why they are sometimes not easier than sentences. Such information would help to establish the bounds of generality of the applied research. But such cognitive applied research is difficult to find.

The next section considers to what extent this illustration of the divergence between pure and applied research on human communication is an isolated example. Frase (1976) has suggested that the two approaches, pure and applied, should be considered as mutually supportive. In this view applied research specifies the design factors which could improve the effectiveness of a document while pure research concentrates on the microskills that help to explain why certain design factors improve performance. Cer- tainly there is no reason in principle why this should not be so. The question, however, is whether or not in practice this is the relationship that currently exists between pure and applied research on comprehension. This is the question addressed in the next section.

2. Comprehension versus Communication: The Relation Between Two Research Fields

2.1. DIFFERENCES IN THE TEXTS STUDIED

The comparison just made of pure and applied research on conjunctive

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and disjunctive statements at least established some communality between the two approaches. Both the pure and the applied study were concerned about the comprehension of a particular kind of written material, namely conjunctive and disjunctive statements. Such communality is not typical. Many of the pure research studies have been concerned with the comprehension of particular linguistic forms such as passives or negatives. These are frequently presented to the reader as single sentences. In contrast many of the applied research studies have been concerned with the effects on comprehension that can be produced by adjuncts to text such as summaries or questions. Here the texts may be several pages long.

Even when pure research examines larger textual units such as para- graphs or stories it is rare to find adjuncts included in the study. Among the exceptions are the studies by Dooling and Lachman (1971) who showed that a heading which set the theme for the text made it easier for readers to remember what they read. Perhaps more dramatically Bransford and Johnson (1973) showed that a paragraph containing the sentence "The haystack was important because the cloth ripped" needed a heading such as The Parachutist in order for the sentence to be understood. But even here it has to be noted that the convergence of pure and applied research does not seem to increase the light being shed on the point of convergence. One line of research says, "Headings are good for you". The other line says, "Yes, they are" (or perhaps, "We already knew that"). Among the research issues which remain unanswered are the following: Which texts need headings? What are the characteristics of a good heading both in content and in typographic style? What kinds of reading purpose are most dependent upon headings? Some applied work is exploring these issues. For example, research by Robinson (1961) suggests that questions may sometimes be more useful than statements as headings. But there are few signs that pure psychologists are wondering why.

It is true that there is a growing interest among pure psychologists in people's ability to remember stories they have read. As a field of research this can be traced back to before the work of Bartlett (1932). For example, Washburne (1929) had shown that questions accompanying text would improve retention. Questions were particularly effective if the information about the correctness of the answers was also provided (Peterson, 1931). Yet it was a long time before researchers closely examined why this occurred (e.g. Rothkopf, 1965; Frase, 1968a).

Recent work by pure psychologists on the retention of lengthy passages of text has tended to concentrate on rather specialised materials. Some of these have been artificially devised, such as the Circle Island story of Dawes (1964). This story has been used by several other investigators (e.g. Thorn- dyke, 1975; Bower, 1976). On other occasions folktales and fables are used (e.g. Bower, 1976; Mandler and Johnson, 1977). It is suggested that because

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these stories stem from an oral tradition they have very similar and unusually clear structural characteristics compared to many other kinds of prose (e.g. Mandler and Johnson, 1977, p. 113). This may well be so but the applied problems usually deal with quite different types of material, as was illustrated in section 1. So it is not clear that research in this area will provide a useful input to curing the particular kinds of digestive problems that have been outlined, although it may have practical application in other areas. Bower (1976, p. 512) writes, "There is the remote hope that one's findings may have practical significance, either in bet ter designing stories for young children, in teaching elements of story telling, or in mechanically summarizing texts for a large information retrieval system."

2.2. DIFFERENCES IN THE POPULATIONS STUDIED

Textual variables are not the only set of factors where contrasts between pure and applied research are easily found. The subject populations taking part in the studies also tend to change as one considers different locations on the pure-appl ied dimension. Most pure research on written information is carried out by testing undergraduates. The major exception would be studies of language acquisition which are often carried out on pre-school and primary-school children. Although some applied research uses college students (e.g. Ro thkopf and Billington, 1975), much is also carried out with older secondary school children (e.g. Gagn6 and Rothkopf , 1975) and with adults (e.g. Chapanis, 1971; Wright, 1977).

It is of course a widely accepted tenet of experimental psychology that cognitive processes have a universality which requires little or no qualifi- cation. As a consequence experimental psychologists are interested in the average performance of the average person. The concern for individual differences is generally left to psychometricians, who are interested in measuring some aspect of cognitive functioning (or personality). The individual who has been measured is then located somewhere on a scale relative to the scores of a peer group. However, the use of such scales implies that differences between people are quantitative rather than qualitative. This tends to reinforce the view that when seeking to analyse performance in information processing terms, then individual differences can be ignored.

Should we accept this commonly held view that for the purposes of experimental psychology the cognitive processes of all men can be considered qualitatively equal? If we do, then the differences in the people providing the data for pure and applied studies of comprehension would not matter. However such assumptions may not be justified. Hunt, Lunneborg and Lewis (1975) have explored how well people with different scores on intelligence tests did on a variety of information processing tasks. These comparisons led Hunt et al. to suggest that there may be certain qualitative differen-

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ces among people. For example, "Low verbals may have to spend more time recovering order information from the context of the situation, while high verbals can rely on an internally assigned time tag" (Hunt et al., 1975, p. 223-224). There have been a number of studies showing that even within a population of college students there exist varying reading strategies (e.g. Thomas, 1965). There is also evidence that people vary in their ability to use imagery to represent the information in sentences (Jones, 1970). The possibility must therefore be faced that such differences between people arise from qualitative differences in the processes underlying comprehension. Attempts to treat school-children, students (usually psychology students) and the proverbial man-in-the-street as a homogeneous data source may be unrealistic. The selection of different target populations for particular studies is another obstacle which hampers those who try combining pure and applied findings in order to solve practical problems of communication.

2.3. DIFFERENCES IN THE READER'S TASK

The third factor in the ""antecedents" box of Fig. 1 is labelled reading goals. As has already been mentioned, the activity of reading can be quite different when done for different purposes. In the context of experimental research the specification of reading goals is usually up to the experimenter. For this reason it often maps directly onto one of the performance measures given in box 2. Subjects will usually know whether they are reading in order to reproduce what they read or to answer a quiz. Subjects taking part in an experiment will tend to read in such a way that they maximize their score on whatever tests they anticipate being administered after reading (e.g. Frase, 1975). It has been found possible to get subjects to read for recall of either general information or specific details (e.g. Samuels and Dahl, 1975), to read for verbatim retention or a paraphrase quiz test (e.g. Aaron- son and Scarborough, 1976). Such studies have shown that both the reading strategy and the ensuing comprehension can be quite different as the reading purpose varies.

One way of examining the correspondence of reading goals in pure and applied research is to consider in turn the performance measures given in Fig. 1. The first performance measure listed is subjective judgments. These would include, for example, judgments of the similarity of paraphrases or of the grammaticalness of a sentence. Such judgments seem to be used only in pure research (e.g. Levelt, 1970, 1974). Occasionally an applied study may use judgments of the difficulty of a text, but there are a number of readability indices which can be used to remove this subjective element. Gilliland (1972) reviews 30 such indices. That such a number should exist testifies both to the felt need for and the inadequacy of such measures.

However, the other performance measures, such as the retention of

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written information and the speed of understanding what is read, would seem to be of common interest to both pure and applied psychologists. But we have already pointed out that there are several different kinds of retention and many different kinds of comprehension. So just how similar are these measures as used in the different research approaches?

2.3.1. Reading for retention Pure research on language comprehension made wide use of tests of

verbatim retention. It might almost seem as if researchers moved from the finding that things which did not make sense were harder to remember, to the over hasty conclusion that difficulty in remembering was a useful index of understanding. A variety of techniques have been used for measuring retention. There have been a number of free recall tasks, in which subjects are required to accurately reproduce single sentences which have been presented. Such a technique may be used either with or without the assistan- ce of retrieval cues from the sentence. On other occasions subjects may need to recall only part of the sentence, perhaps just a single word. This response may be the word which followed a 'probe' item from the sentence, or it may be the answer to a question. Recognition techniques are also used in pure research. Measuring the difficulty that people have in rejecting a paraphrase of a sentence previously presented, has been a useful way of exploring how well people retain the sense rather than the specific wording of what they read (e.g. Sachs, 1967; Johnson-Laird and Stevenson, 1970).

In contrast to this rather extensive use of various retention techniques in pure research, applied research has relied much more on quizzing people about what they remember after reading. This is analogous to some of the probe techniques mentioned above, but it is often much less dependent upon verbatim retention. Indeed it may even require that the reader draw inferen- ces rather than simply reiterate what has been read.

In spite of widespread use of retention techniques, pure psychologists have recognised that there can be considerable hazards in using such procedures to explore comprehension processes. Fillenbaum (1970 )po in t ed out two major drawbacks. One is that it is difficult to disentangle the specifically language related processes from those which are a more general property of the cognitive operations of memory and intelligence. The kinds of mistakes that can arise as a consequence were illustrated by Wright and Kahne- man (1971). They used a probe technique to obtain partial recall of sentences and compared this with requiring total recall of the same sentences. They found that with total recall the first part of the sentence was best remembered; with partial recall the last part was best. They demonstrated that this difference between the two retention tasks was the result of different memory processes, rather than different language analysis, by producing the same effects with word lists (Kahneman and Wright, 1971). Any pure rese-

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arch which had relied on only one retention technique to explore, for example, the differential salience of various parts of a sentence could easily have been misled.

A second problem, which Fillenbaum pointed out was inevitable when using a memory task, is that the linguistic processing undertaken by subjects may differ in important respects from that required in other "comprehension" tasks. There are a number of studies which illustrate Fillenbaum's point. For example, Aaronson and Scarborough (1976) showed that readers distributed their pauses within sentences differently when they were reading for verbatim retention as compared with when they were reading in order to answer a paraphrase question. When reading for verbatim retention subjects tended to pause at the end of phrase boundaries. When reading in order to answer a paraphrase question subjects tended to pause longest on the major content items.

These problems which handicap pure psychologists when using retention techniques are not shared by applied psychologists. In applied research where the behavioural unit being studied is much larger, there is no need to dissect the contributions made to performance from different sources. If putting in an appropriate heading makes the material easier to remember, it is of no consequence to the applied psychologist whether this is a perceptual, linguistic, or memorial factor. It is sufficient to know that it works.

This emphasis in applied research on finding solutions to practical problems of communication, should not be thought of as indicating that retention measures cause no problems. They do, but they are rather different from the problems which worry pure researchers. In applied studies there is often much greater concern than in pure studies that whatever test is given after reading should reflect understanding as well as ability to recall. Conse- quently verbatim retention tests may be seen as inappropriate. Similarly some kinds of questions can be answered correctly without any reference to the meaning of the sentence. Urquhart (1977) illustrated this point using nonsense words. After reading The melfip delfebbed the worglop you can answer a question such as Who delfebbed the worglop? The correct answer is no indication that the sentence has been understood. That this should be a matter of greater concern in applied studies than in pure research is a further indication of the contrast between them, even when using related performance measures such as retention.

2.3.2. Reading for speed Pure psychologists have shown a great deal of interest in the speed

with which people understand various kinds of sentences. Speed is taken as a reflection of the ease of understanding the sentence. From the applied standpoint too it is clearly advantageous to know whether information can be structured so that it is read more quickly without loss of comprehension.

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However, as with retention tests the similarity between the two approaches is more apparent than real.

A typical experimental paradigm used in pure research in comprehension involves measuring the latency with which people can say whether a sentence such as The star is not above the cross correctly describes a picture showing a star and a cross. A number of information-processing models have been developed to account for performance in such tasks. The models postulate that iterative comparison procedures are applied to the internal representation of the sentence and picture, in order to establish whether or not these two representations match. The most parsimonious of such models, and indeed the most successful to date, is that of Carpenter and Just (1975). As with retention procedures, queries can be raised about the generality of the processes being examined (e.g. Tannenhaus et al., 1976). Never- theless within the relevant boundary conditions, in tasks where readers verify the truth or falsity of the sentences they read, pure research is finding latency a very illuminating measure of performance.

Applied psychologists have not derived the same mileage from speed measures. One of the reasons is that in experimental situations which resemble private study sessions, there is often a speed-accuracy trade-off. Thus an improvement in performance on a quiz given after reading may be associated with a longer time having been spent reading. For practical purposes the improvement in accuracy is usually the most important factor. Nevertheless, certain confusions can be found in the literature, made by those who think that the only acceptable link between boxes 1 and 2 of Fig. 1 is via the route of theories of HOW. For example, Carver (1970) criticized work by Roth- kopf which showed that questions used in conjunction with a text could improve performance. Carver's objection was based on the grounds that the questions had increased the time spent reading. In many respects such a criticism is inappropriate. The applied psychologist is mainly concerned with producing an improved quiz performance. The questions used by Rothkopf were successful in doing this. It remains an empirical question as to whether other procedures which increase the time spent reading would have a similar effect. At this point the isolation of the critical factors in the reading situation can be seen as analogous to the earlier discussion of the treatment of rickets. First there is a need to find something that works. Subsequently the need arises to isolate and refine the critical parameters which contribute to the solution. Variables which must be "controlled" by those interested in underlying processes may need no such treatment from researchers with different objectives.

In applied research the speed of reading is often treated as a reflection of the skill of the reader. Whereas the pure psychologist asks How long does a reader take to read this, the applied psychologist asks What can be done to help the reader take less time. The solutions examined by

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applied research include the development of particular reading skills such as "speed reading". Successful training programmes need consist of little more than an introduction to the redundancy of language (Morton, 1966). Once readers appreciate that there is no need to read absolutely everything that is on the page there is a marked improvement in the speed of reading.

This point was amplified in a study by Samuels and Dahl (1975). The reading passage was followed by one of two sorts of multiple-choice quiz. Either the quiz required general information such as "The topic o f this story is (a) a car race (b) a parade (c) a war"; or the quiz required detailed answers such as "The actual building of the floats begins in (a) early spring (b) late summer (c) late fall." Readers were shown the type of quiz to expect before they started reading. Samuels and Dahl found that people reading for a general overview read more than 50% faster than those reading for specific details. The effects of such variation in reading purpose might seem to cloud the issues examined by those interested in the processes underlying comprehension. Certainly the variations attributable to reading skill and reading purpose raise questions about the generality of psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension based on verification tasks.

Yet another factor to affect reading speed has been noted by Rothkopf and Coatney (1974). They measured the time taken to read a standard message when it was preceded either by an easy or by a difficult passage. They found that the slower reading of the difficult passage carried over into slower reading of the standard passage. Perhaps this too has implications for possible transfer effects that could arise in pure research on comprehension where speed is the critical measure of performance. Certainly the attention of all psychologists, both pure and applied, has recently been drawn to the difficulties that can be caused by asymmetric transfer effects within experiments (e.g. Poulton, 1973, 1975).

2.4. DIFFERENCES IN THE USE OF COMPUTERS

The comparisons made so far in this section have been comparisons between two groups of researchers both of whom were using the conventional methodology of experimental psychology. Increasingly in recent years there have been discussions of the suitability of this conventional paradigm for studying human cognitive processes (e.g. Simon, 1970; Allport, 1976). The alternative being put forward appears to rest mainly on two foundations. It is based in part on the methodology of Artificial Intelligence, where the objective is to simulate human psychological processes as a technique for making apparent the necessary information- processing operations which must underlie cognitive performance. The second tenet of this approach is the belief that there is more mileage to be had from estimating reliable parameters of human performance than there is in finding statistic-

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ally significant differences between treatments. For example, Simon (1970, pp. 5, 6) writes:

When Galileo rolled a ball down an inclined plane -- if he did - he did not consider the horizontal plane to be the 'contral condition'. He did not test the null hypo- thesis that the roiling would be the same on an inclined as on a horizontal plane. Instead, he determined the function relating the acceleration, as dependent variable, to the slope of the plane as independent variable...

On the face of it, such a functional approach would seem much more likely to map into the Theories of WHEN box of Fig. 1 than would the experimental literature discussed earlier in this section. Certainly this ~non-hypo- thesis testing' approach has given rise to some impressive simulations of human language comprehension (e.g. Winograd, 1972), although the approach has its critics (e.g. Dresher and Hornstein, 1976). Nevertheless, it is not clear that the problems being addressed by those working in Artificial Intelligence are affording any clearer specification of the parameters of comprehension (i.e. of what, by whom and for what purpose), than the traditional experimental work on comprehension. Perhaps the major exception to this statement is the work being developed on individual differences (e.g. Hunt, Lunneborg and Lewis, 1975) but this has tended to be concerned with general cognition rather than reading tasks as such. Without such specifications it is difficult to relate either the models or the concepts to the problems of designing specific kinds of written information. There does appear to be a concern to make such a mapping (e.g. Klahr, 1976), but the information flow is usually from Pure to Applied. This can be difficult for a number of reasons which will be discussed in section 4.

The influence of the ideas generated by artificial intelligence can be found in the realm of graphic communication. For example, Macdonald-Ross (1978) interprets the Artificial Intelligence approach to problem solving, where the task is fitted into strategies available for the solution, as meaning that a graphical format is a canonical representation for problems of a certain class. But for the most part the impact of computers on applied research has been much more mundane. Computers are used as a technique for simplifying administrative procedures such as various editing functions, during the preparation of written texts. They are used as tools both for content analysis and also for indexing information retrieval systems (references can be found in Macdonald-Ross and Smith, 1974). The computer 's impact on the way written information is presented can often be seen in documents such as forms (e.g. Wright, 1975). Indeed here it appears that the computer is a tool which solves some problems while creating others. The reduction in clerical effort is often bought at the form-filler's expense. Similarly an operator sitting at a computer-controlled display unit may retrieve the information needed more rapidly than if the information is

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stored in some alternative system, but on occasion the cost of such rapid retrieval is that the information itself is impoverished. It may have been reduced to a telegraphic communication to fit the VDU screen. Its legibility may be much poorer than that of a printed text. Indeed even if "pr inted" it may be produced by teletypewriter that has only upper case letters available, although this has long been known to make reading more difficult (e.g. Poulton, 1968). Although the potential exists for using the computer as a means for carrying out certain kinds of research on information presentation that would not otherwise be possible (e.g. research analogous to that on computer-assisted instruction) it does not yet seem that this is very widely being done. Therefore even a common interest in certain sophisticated devices for presenting written information does not seem enough to generate a significant interaction between pure and applied researchers.

2.5. SUMMARY

This section has sought to illustrate how disparate are the texts, populations, reading goals and performance measures selected for pure and applied research studies of comprehension. In section 1 it was suggested that somewhere between pure cognitive research and applied research there was room for applied cognitive research and cognitive applied research. It is such missing links that Frase (1976) alluded to when he characterized as "mutually supportive" the roles of pure and applied research. The next section will consider the consequences that the absence of this link has for both pure and applied research.

3. Why Encourage Interactions Between Pure and Applied Research?

3.1. WHO WOULD BENEFIT?

Both pure and applied researchers stand to gain from a pattern of interaction that differs from the state of affairs outlined in section 2. Each could gain in the generalizability of the research findings. All experimental studies are designed with the intention that the conclusions drawn should be relevant outside the specific data points collected empirically. Nevertheless, in the domain of written communication there may be problems in drawing general conclusions from both pure and applied research. These problems will be discussed in greater detail below, but it will have become apparent from section 2 that pure researchers often make a narrow selection among the antecedents to reading, such as texts, populations and reading purposes. Such selection restrictions inevitably risk limiting the breadth of the conclusions that can be drawn. Many applied research studies have similar limitations. But here the limitations arise from the necessity of selecting some sub-set of variables for examination within a particular experiment.

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In the absence of an adequate theoretical rationale guiding such choices (see the discussion by Macdonald-Ross, in press) experimenters differ in their selections. The outcome is a literature full of conflicting research findings (see section 5 below).

There are several solutions to this problem of obtaining data which can safely lead to generalizable conclusions. One solution would be the increasing use of richer factorial designs, in both pure and applied research. Another solution is to foster the development of cognitive ergonomics that could create an interaction between the pure and applied approaches to comprehension. Such interactions may have the potential to facilitate the solution of practical problems. They may also have the potential for reducing some of the risks that pure research runs. For example, the risk of becoming preoccupied with materials or procedures that have little validity with respect to the comprehension processes used by many readers in many reading tasks. Just as the information flow among researchers that is being advocated here is not linear but circular, from applied to pure and back to applied, so the benefits of such interaction are not narrowly localised by are diffuse.

3.2. GENERALIZING ACROSS MATERIALS

Whereas applied research often takes as its starting point a piece of text that actually exists in the real world, pure research often devises linguistic materials specifically for experimental purposes. It is easy to find extreme examples where the sentence is rather unlikely to occur naturally, even in the rogues gallery of illustrations given in section 1. For example, Sherman (1976) asked his subjects whether the following sentence was reasonable, in the sense of having consistent internal logic: He liked to make decisions for the group and thus everyone doubted that he wouM be unsuited for the Director's job. Certainly people can discover how to deal with such sentences. The data indicate statistical reliability. Nevertheless it has to be asked whether people are dealing with such sentences in the same way they would process natural utterances.

Why should naturalness have any relevance to experimental research? In pure studies the variables of interest have been abstracted from their natural setting in order to examine them more closely in the laboratory. Surely naturalness is no longer relevant? Part of the reason why naturalness matters is that background data on the frequency °f. occurrence of specific linguistic forms may contribute toward an explanation of their apparent difficulty. For example Goldman-Eisler and Cohen (1970) have argued that the infrequent occurrence of passives containing an agent may contribute to the difficulty that people have in understanding such sentences. This implies a need for caution in the interpretation of latency differences in pure

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research. Such differences may arise not only from a variation in the number of information processing steps taken in comprehending particular sentence forms, but also from the ease of retrieving and assembling particular information processing routines.

A second reason why it is important that experimenters should know about naturally occurring language forms is that the laudable pursuit of experimental controls may introduce into the materials various unnoticed factors that inadvertently prejudice the results. For example, in a comparison of the comprehension of active and passive sentences it appears experimentally clean to use the same determiner (the/a) throughout all sentences. However, Wright and Glucksberg (1976) found that passive sentences usually have the first and second nouns differently determined. This implies that a number of other studies, although apparently well-controlled, may actually be using materials that impair performance with passive sentences.

Clark (1973) raised the issue of generalizability across experimental materials. He suggested a statistical procedure whereby experimenters could interpret treatment effects with respect to the variability across sentences used, as well as across subjects. However there is no statistical procedure that would unravel confounded variables such as spurious experimental controls. Either the researcher must start from information about naturally occurring sentence forms, or the experimental design must be expanded to provide a parametric exploration of the bounds of generalizability of the research findings.

In dealing with this problem of generalizability, statistically significant interactions are much more informative than simple main effects. Interac- tions highlight the boundary conditions within which particular effects can be expected. Such a comment applies equally to pure and applied research. There are several reasons why such a parametric, interaction-seeking approach is not commonly followed. One is that it utilises larger, more expensive research designs. Another reason is the previously mentioned tenet of experimental psychology that we need only be concerned with the average performance of the average person in whatever situation we are interested. A third reason is that such designs are often used to trawl for hypotheses

rather than to test them. Let us examine these three reasons in turn, considering first the size

problem. Certainly there is no denying that this is a real problem. It is quite unclear how many parameters should be selected from the text, population and goal factors of box 1 when considering a particular piece of research. For example, should the population parameters include various age groups, various intelligence groups, groups varying in specialized knowledge of the content of the text, groups varying in their command of the language in which the text is written? Kao (1976) listed 21 factors which ergonomists might see as relevant to the design of educational texts. Yet the list seems

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endless. This is undoubtedly a daunting prospect but it must be remembered that studies of simple main effects can easily be misleading. Without parametric studies, the experimental literature becomes choked with failures to replicate particular findings. This seems particularly true in applied research where greater variation exists between studies, at least in the selection of materials and of subjects. For example Hartley and Davies (1976) reviewed experiments which were designed to assess how test performance after reading was affected by giving readers pretests before reading. Hartley and Davies cite sixteen studies in which pretests improved performance. They also found four where performance was impaired and eighteen where no effects could be found. Some of these failures to replicate undoubtedly existed for procedural reasons (e.g. ceiling effects). Others appeared to be due to significant changes in the content presented or in the goals set for the reader. One such significant factor could be the kind of questions asked in the pretest, whether they were general or specific. If the pretest questions were of a different kind from those asked in the post-test then performance was likely to be impaired. Hartley and Davies showed how an overview of apparently conflicting findings from applied research could be used to highlight critical interactions, thereby indicating the bounds of generalizability to be expected for particular t reatment effects.

Similar overviews of pure research are not so easily constructed. Where the research objective is to explore hypothetical underlying processes, a failure to replicate previous experimental findings may be due to the model of the processes being inadequate in some fundamental sense. Alternatively, there may be new factors in the experimental situation which make the model inappropriate. In this case the model is right but its generality is limited. Choosing between these alternatives is a perennial problem in pure research, where the bias has been towards favouring a single model of comprehension that would be modified as inadequacies were found. Such a bias can be considered a reflection of the scant attention paid in pure research to the antecedant variables of box 1 in Fig. 1. It seems reasonable to ask about "The Processes" mediating comprehension if one ignores the variations to be found in texts, people and reading purposes. From such a viewpoint parameter-plotting to establish bounds of generalizability seems totally irrelevant. But if people have a variety of sentence processing strategies, then models of comprehension may be forced to come to terms with this. One way of handling differences in comprehension strategy is to set the models in the context of the comprehension of what, by whom and for what purposes. More about strategy variations below.

The third reason for a reluctance to use factorial designs to hunt for interactions is that often when such designs are to be found in the literature they appear to be a substitute for critical thought by the experimenter. Fac- tors seem to be included on the basis of "I wonder what would happen

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i f . . . " rather than arising from the selection of hypotheses which would dis- criminate either among possible explanations of performance or among possible boundary conditions of performance. The frequent use of male- female as one set of population factors is perhaps a typical example. Often there are no cogent reasons for expecting such factors to interact with treatment effects. They are included "just in case". This kind of unmotivat- ed enlargement of experimental designs is not what is being suggested here. Rather the point is being made that there are good reasons for thinking that comprehension strategies may change in various circumstances. Consequent- ly both pure and applied research could benefit from explicitly recognising this.

3.3. GENERALIZING ACROSS COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES

3. 3.1. Active and passive strategies Although it appears to be generally true that at present there is a bias

towards monolithic theories of comprehension in pure research, in other areas of psychology there is evidence for a greater willingness to come to terms with different strategies that people may select. For example, there is an increasingly accepted distinction between two complementary kinds of information processing. Bobrow and Norman (1975, p. 140) write:

The processing system can be driven either conceptually or by events. Conceptually driven processing tends to be top-down, driven by motives and goals, and fitting input to expectations; event driven processing tends to be bottom-up, finding structures in which to embed the input.

Conceptually driven processing draws heavily on a person's general knowledge about the world. Hypotheses are generated by " top" processing levels and are then checked against " lower" sensory information. The difficulty of spotting typographic mistakes in printers' proofs is one well-known illustration of the occurrence of top-down operations during reading. The information processes concerned with the sensory information on the printed page are dominated by higher, conceptual and interpretive levels of analysis. The alternative kind of information processing, labelled "bo t tom-up" , is determined by whatever sensory data are available. Reading the number plate of a car will be much more dependent on "bo t tom-up" operations than will reading a nursery rhyme, because the grounds for generating hypotheses are very much less for alpha-numeric sequences.

In the comprehension of written materials, these two kinds of information processing usually combine. Details of the way in which this combination is achieved have not yet been clarified. From outside the domain of written communication there is evidence that some tasks and some materials can set upper limits to the involvement of both top-down and bot tom-up

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processing operations (e.g. Norman and Bobrow, 1975). Consequently there is a need to know what factors will determine when each of these will be the chief determinants of comprehension. How do the relative contributions of active top-down and passive bot tom-up processes vary across texts, across reading purposes and across people?

A similar but not identical distinction about levels of processing has been made by Craik and Lockhart (1972). They were particularly interested in the way that variations in the task set by an experimenter could encourage people to encode information to different levels of abstraction. (To assist everyone's confusion this dimension of analysis is often referred to as "depth of processing", with the higher conceptual levels being said to have the greater depth). This notion of depth of processing seems to be a particularly important factor in studies using retention measures. For example, Mistler- Lachman (1974) showed that people more accurately remembered the final sentence in a short two sentence text if they had to make up a third sentence to continue the text than if they simply made judgments about whether the final sentence was itself meaningful or not. The bet ter retention is attributed by Mistler-Lachman to " the necessity for greater semantic processing" when a third sentence had to be invented. Applied research supports this idea that greater involvement with the text leads to bet ter retention by the reader. For example Larkin and Reif (1976) taught students how to formulate questions for themselves before reading a text. This significantly improved the retention of the material which was read. Sometimes notetaking may also generate an interaction with the text which improves retention (see the review by Hartley and Davies, 1978).

The concept o f 'dep th of processing is also useful in providing a framework within which it is possible to examine the distinction between knowing what the question means and knowing what the answer is. For example, you may know almost at once that you know the answer to a question such as "Is it true that a century is not longer than a decade?" Nevertheless it may be some little while before you are certain whether to reply yes or no. In fact this example illustrates that there are at least three rather different ways in which such a question can be understood. There are processes which enable you to say that the question can be answered, i.e. that personally you know the meaning of the words and can cope with the structure of the sentence. There are also processes which generate the appropriate semantic relations, i.e. that a century is longer than a decade. There are also processes which relate this semantic information to the form required for answering the question. It is not always clear that the notion of processing to an ever increasing "dep th" is the most useful way of representing these rather different kinds of understanding. It might characterise the first two kinds of processing, but perhaps the third is something rather different. Indeed there are probably those who would not wish to include this third set of

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processing operations within the domain of comprehension. This is perhaps a moot point.

Studies of these computational processes which occur subsequent to the assignment of meaning to the words in a sentence, have usually employed tasks that call for logical reasoning. There are several studies showing how dominant the top-down processes can be in such tasks. For example, Frase (1968b) found that people were more likely to make a logical slip and accept an invalid conclusion if it was consistent with their general knowledge (e.g. some mothers are evil) than if it was not. Similarly people would make mistakes in rejecting valid conclusions in these logic games if these conclusions were inconsistent with their general knowledge (e.g. all mothers are evil).

Observations on errors of this kind are not new. They were noted by Bartlett (1932). He asked students to read and reproduce stories from other cultures, and labelled as "normalizing" this tendency to distort the text so that it became more compatible with the reader's existing knowledge structures. When pure research on comprehension uses single sentences such as "It isn't true that the dots are red", it risks overlooking the role that such factors may play in comprehension. Some pure research stresses the multiplicity of processing operations available to the reader (e.g. Bradshaw, 1975; Kolers, 1975), but even here there is no systematic mapping between such operations and the antecedants to reading suggested in Fig. 1. What seems to be needed is a recognition that alternative comprehension strategies exist. From this may develop a specification of the factors which will determine when a particular strategy is likely to be used.

3.3.2. The use o f imagery and other short cuts The role of imagery in cognitive processes is a matter of some con-

troversy. For example, Pylyshyn (1973) and Kosslyn and Pomerantz (1977) have put forward quite different views, the former doubting and the latter defending the usefulness of imagery as an explanatory construct. Yet there is evidence that images may play an important role in some comprehension tasks. It appears that the critical determinants of imagery include characteristics of the text, of the subject population and of the reader's purpose. The critical textual variables are related to the concreteness or imagability of the words used in sentences. For example, Klee and Eysenck (1973) showed that subjects could more easily make judgments about whether or not a sentence was sensible if the sentence contained concrete nouns. Given the two sentences:

(a) The veteran soldier rode the lame horse (b) The wrong attitude caused a major loss

People decided that (a) was meaningful more rapidly than they reached decisions about (b). Furthermore, Klee and Eysenck showed that this rela-

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tive advantage of concreteness could be reduced by interpolating a visually presented digit between each word of the spoken sentence. These digits were recalled after the judgment of the sentence's meaningfulness had been made. This finding is interpreted as evidence that visually mediated imagery processes "may precede understanding of concrete material".

When sentences must be remembered the contribution of imagery processes may be even greater. Davies and Proctor (1976) asked people to read aloud three sentences. Then after 20 seconds of an interpolated task they cued recall of the sentences. They found that different kinds of sentence were most impaired by different types of intervening task. Retention of concrete sentences was worse after a visual tracking task than after a verbal counting- backwards task. The reverse relationship held for abstract sentences. These were remembered better after the visual task than after the verbal task.

There is some indirect evidence that the use of imagery may be affected not only by lexis but also by syntax. Jones (1970) allowed people to take notes while they were listening to three-term series problems of the type A is happier than B; C is sadder than B. Who is happiest? Analysis of the notes taken showed that people often arranged the terms A, B and C on a single vertical or horizontal axis. Moreover there was considerable consisten- cy between people on the "meaning" of such a spatial dimension. Terms like 'better ' , 'happier', ' thicker', 'fatter' all tended to be put at the top of a vertical dimension when the premise was affirmative. For example, given a premise which said A is happier than B, 100% of those using vertical axes put A at the top. In contrast, for a logically equivalent but negative premise, for example B is not as happy as A, only 67% of these subjects using the vertical dimension put A at the top. This implies that even within the constraints of a single task, there may be important differences both within and between subjects in the way they choose to represent the meanings of sentences.

Just as the use of imagery may vary with characteristics of the text, so it may vary with characteristics of the individual. Such characteristics are difficult to capture experimentally for two reasons. On the one hand they may be confounded with other cognitive processing differences. For example, Klee and Eysenck (1973) in the study mentioned above asked subjects to return after the experiment. On this second occasion the volunteers were given a battery of imagery tests. It was found that people with high imagery scores on this bat tery had previously made faster judgments of sentence meaningfulness than those with low imagery scores. However this difference was statistically significant only for judgments about abstract sentences. This unexpected relation with type of sentence could imply that as well as imagery differences a difference in some more general cognitive functioning was also be ing picked up by the test battery. In principle such differences can be controlled for in appropriate experimental designs. This is not the case with the second reason for difficulty in capturing differences between indi- viduals in the sentence processing strategies that they may be using.

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This second difficulty is that the strategy used by an individual may not be constant even during a single experiment. For example, Wood et al. (1974) expanded the three-term series problem to include five terms. People were asked about the relation between just two of the items in the series. For example, they might be asked about Pete and Wilf in the following problem:

Pete? Wilf Pete is taller than Bob. Bob is taller than Ken. Ken is taller than Steve. Will is taller than Steve. Ken is taller than Wilf.

After this question had been answered the next problem would be presented. On just one occasion during the experiment, instead of a new problem there would be a new question about the problem which had just been solved. This unexpected question occurred after a different number of problems for different experimental groups. Wood et al. found that if the unexpected question was asked early in the test session it was more likely to be correctly answered. They suggest that this change in accuracy reflects a change in subjects' coding strategy from being "representational" (i.e. using imagery) to "non-representational" (i.e. abstract or propositional). Other explanations may be possible. For example, with practice subjects may become skilled at selecting only sufficient information to answer the question and so may not encode some "presented" information at all. The form of representation may not necessarily have changed.

There is certainly evidence that people find ways of solving some reasoning problems without the need to read the information sententially at all. Quinton and Fellows (1975) point out that in order to answer the problem:

Martin is shorter than Norman. Oliver is taller than Norman. Who is the shortest?

One can proceed as follows solving the question with respect to each premise in turn:

(a) The first premise, check whether the comparative in the question matches that in the premise. If Yes, the answer is the first name mentioned; if No the answer is the second name mentioned.

(b) The second premise, and thereby the problem, check if the answer to the first premise occurs in the second. If it does not then it is the answer

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to the problem itself. If it does then the other name in the second premise is the answer. Thus in the previous example the comparative in the question (short) matches the comparative in the first line, therefore Martin is the answer to the first premise. Since Martin does not occur in the second premise this is also the answer to the problem itself.

Quinton and Fellows found that problem solving strategies such as this were yielding answers in half the time taken by those people using imagery or conventional verbal-reasoning strategies; but not everyone discovered the short cuts. Indeed among the 26 people tested by Quinton and Fellows there were at least seven different problem solving strategies being used, and subjects reported that they changed strategies several times during the experiments. Moreover, the most effective two-part strategy would not apply to many other kinds of problem, for example problems in which the premises contained negatives. Yet the point being made is a general one. Other problems might require other strategies. These await exploration before being made explicit. But recognising that such processing variation exists is only a first step. The problem remains as to how such strategy differences are to be incorporated within theories of comprehension, both pure and applied.

One applied approach to such strategy differences might be to train people in the use of the most effective means of solving the problems. Quinton and Fellows did this for a couple of subjects and found that these people were then solving the problems in approximately half the time taken by those using the short cuts they had discovered themselves. This is consistent with the suggestion that untrained subjects may vary their strategies on different occasions. Perhaps they are looking for even shorter cuts.

These examples have all used tasks which require logical reasoning, but such strategy differences may also occur in other comprehension tasks, particularly where matching processes are important. Consequently it may be a problem in studies where people are asked to match a sentence against a picture. Clark and Chase (1972) reported in a footnote that some of their subjects appeared to be using coding strategies which differed from those used by other subjects. Inevitably strategy differences are a stumbling block when it comes to generalising about the psychological processes underlying comprehension. Specifying the range of strategies is a necessary first step. Only then can one begin looking for the determinants of particular strategies. And only when these determinants have been isolated can they be incorporated as appropriate factors in experimental designs that are intended to explore the generality of a given treatment effect. Nevertheless in the absence of such information about comprehension strategies it is possible that greater interaction between pure and applied research might provide a useful way round the problem of establishing generalizability.

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3.4, THE ROLE OF COGNITIVE APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY

Earlier, when exploring Rothkopf's analogy between meat-eaters and information-eaters, it was suggested that the most useful flow of information between the pure and applied research areas would be from applied to pure and back te applied. Such interaction would help to reduce the problems of knowing the bounds of generalizability of particular research findings. Take as an example of an applied starting point the use of typographic cueing in text. Foster (1977) has reviewed many of the studies on this topic. Typographic cueing means that the visual appearance of part of the text is altered. Many kinds of alterations are possible. These include the use of different cases (upper and lower), the use of italics and other special fonts, the use of different sizes and different weights of type (e.g. light and bold), the use of underlining and of course colour. These changes can be applied to single words or to larger sections of text.

From the literature review provided by Foster it is clear that although typographic cueing is often helpful to readers, the bounds of generalizability have not been well determined. A tabulation by Foster of 21 experimental comparisons showed 14 studies where cueing improved performance and seven studies where it significantly impaired performance. As is common in applied research there were a great many differences among the experiments. These differences include whether the performance measures were for cued or non-cued material. Perhaps if the reading goals had been well defined in all studies, the retention of non-cued information might have been seen as less relevant to many of these goals. The differences also include whether the readers were told anything about the convention for cueing. Varying both the visual appearance of the text and the information given to readers might seem to be introducing a confounded variable into the experimental design, but there is also a sense in which the "'treatment" might be more appropriately thought of as the combined package of text plus instructions. Without such instructions the reader may be undertaking a problem solving task, trying to work out why the typographic variation is there. This task is superimposed on that of reading the passage. Conflicting experimental findings across different studies are therefore hardly surprising.

Given the frequent diversity and confusion of compilations of applied studies, how can one hope to promote greater interaction between pure and applied researchers? One possibility is to start with some of the firmer applied findings. For example, faster readers seem to derive more benefit from cueing than less able readers (Klare, Mabry and Gustafson, 1955; Kulhavy, 1972). Cognitive applied research might then seek to establish what it is that the better readers are doing that is benefited by typographic cues. It may be that the good readers are using particular kinds of organization to remember the material. If this is so then there should be predictable

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effects from examining texts having different kinds of organization (e.g. hierarchical structures, list structures, etc.). Another possibility is that typographic cues capture and focus attention during reading. If this is so then effects might be noticeable in terms of eye-movement patterns or fixation durations.

Unfortunately these comments are necessarily speculative because such questions do not seem to have been asked in the research literature. If they had been then the answers could have been taken up again by applied psychologists. For example, the answers might have direct implications for training less able readers how to profit from such cueing. The answers from cognitive applied psychology might also provide guidelines as to factors that could usefully be included in factorial, parameter-plotting, applied studies since they might suggest the kinds of texts or reading purposes which lie outside the facilitative scope of cueing.

But such cognitive applied psychology, apart from being of use to applied research, is also able to highlight the bounds of generalizability of pure research. For example information about typographic variables might indicate certain boundary conditions for eye-movement studies; similarly it may indicate certain limiting characteristics of textual organization. In short, cognitive applied psychology has the role of amplifying the factors in box 1 (Fig. 1), within which the generalizability of pure research must be set: the comprehension of what, by whom and for what purposes.

Problems concerning the use of typographic cueing, come from a problem area where the link with cognitive applied psychology does not exist to help promote interaction with pure research. That is to say, no one has asked what typographic cueing does when it is effective. For other topics the link promoting such interaction is more firmly established. For example research on the effects of questions accompanying text has started from the evidence that such questions can be useful and has explored how this utility is achieved (e.g. Frase, 1975; Rothkopf, 1976). In brief the answer seems to be that questions encourage the reader to select and or- ganise information from the text. Once such an answer has been found it is possible to return to the applied problem and consider ways of achieving this enhanced performance other than by explicitly providing questions. Teaching readers how to formulate their own questions is one possibility. Indeed this has proved successful within the domain of science texts (Larkin and Reif, 1976).

Cognitive applied psychology, which starts from the evidence about WHEN certain performance changes occur and tries mapping these into HOW the changes are brought about, necessarily shades into applied cognitive psychology which is often trying to build a similar bridge but from the other direction. Sometimes it is a consequence of the psychologist knowing how certain information processing occurs that he is able to spot problems

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that would otherwise have been unrecognised. For example, Barnard et al. (1977) had long been concerned with how information is structured in memory. Their knowledge of human memory processes led them to predict that when people are searching through lists, looking for a particular item, the search would be faster if the items in the list reflected the categorisation pattern to be found in memory. It is a characteristic of human memory that items are clustered in generic categories. Fish, flowers and fruit form separate clusters. An alternative organizational scheme would be the much more familiar principle of an alphabetic listing of items. The data from Barnard et al. confirmed the prediction that the "unfamiliar" but memory-compatible organisation was easiest to use.

This example seems to illustrate that the findings of pure research can be applied to practical situations. It was the practical problem of the best way to display computer-held information which initially gave rise to the experiment. Yet this example also illustrates that such application required further experimentation. The solution of practical problems requires the construction of a bridge of empirical evidence showing that the predictions from pure theories are relevant in the practical context. The question therefore arises as to how easily such bridges can be built. The suggestion was made earlier that the difficulty of bridge-building is asymmetric, being much harder when starting from the side of pure research. Nevertheless, in so far as bridges have been attempted, pure foundations have been the most frequently chosen. The next section examines some of the successes and problems which have been encountered.

4. Some Applications of Pure Research on Comprehension

4.1. AN APPLICATION TO LEAFLETS

Psycholinguistic research has shown that there is an asymmetric difficulty between comparative terms such as taller-shorter (e.g. Clark, 1969). It has already been mentioned in discussing work on imagery by Jones (1970) that with affirmative statements people are consistent in selecting one of the terms to be at the top of a vertical axis and the other at the bottom. In a variety of experiments it has been found that people can process the " top" term more easily than the antonym. Clark (1969) has put forward an explanation of this asymmetry in which he suggests that the " top" term is neutral whereas the "bo t tom" term is marked. By neutral Clark means that the term specifies only the dimension and not a particular region of the dimension. If you ask, "How tall is John?" you are not imply- ing that John is tall, you are merely specifying the comparative dimension of interest. On the other hand if you ask "How short is John?" this question

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does carry the implication that John is short. The comparative short not only specifies the dimension of interest but also marks the particular region on that dimension where interest is focussed. Marked comparatives appear to be psychologically more complex, i.e. are acquired developmentally at a later stage and even for adults take longer to verify, than the neutral comparatives.

Wright and Barnard (1975) utilised this notion of the asymmetric difficulty of comparative terms. Specifically they considered the terms more and less. The evidence for the greater difficulty of less is considerable (e.g. Palermo, 1973). Wright and Barnard asked if this would still be true when people were using numerical tables to make judgments about various quantities in an imaginary industrial world depicted on a problem sheet. Some subjects made "more than" judgments. They said "YES" when the values in the problems were greater than the tabulated values; other subjects made "less than" judgments, saying YES when the quantities given in the problems were less than the tabulated values.

One reason why the psycholinguistic finding might not have been relevant in this situation is that people were free to alter the direction in which they made their comparisons. Consequently they could remove the less than comparison by making their decision rule: "Say YES if the tabulated value is more than the value in the problem". However, the data showed that the decision rule as given by the experimenter was the one accepted by subjects and a clear advantage both in speed and accuracy was found for the more than decision. As the authors themselves pointed out, this has some very straightforward applications. They give as an example a welfare benefit leaflet which included a numerical matrix with weekly rent as column headings, family size as row headings and income in the cell values. The decision rule accompanying the table told people to apply for an allowance if their income was less than that shown in the table. Interchanging the rent and income information would have permitted the decision rule, "Apply for an allowance if your rent is more than that shown in the table". Theory and data both suggest that people would have found this alternative version much easier to understand.

4.2. AN APPLICATION TO FORMS

From an unexpected success for psychological theory we can turn to an unexpected failure. Technically this is not a failure of theory since there is no widely agreed theory of how information is structured in semantic memory. Nevertheless, readers can easily verify for themselves that it is easier to retrieve a range of attributes for a given item (e.g. list five things which all tigers have) than to find a range of items having a given attribute (e.g. five things which all have stripes). Consequently one would expect

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that when someone has answered a question such as Do tigers have stripes? they will find it easier to continue answering questions about tigers than about stripes. What relevance might this have to the design of application forms? When such forms request information about household details it is quite often the case that the names of the people living in the house are entered in a vertical list on the left-hand side of the page, thereby forming row headings. Then across the top of the page, as column headings, are a series of questions (such as Age, Income, etc.). People tend to fill in such forms by working along each row in turn. In this way they are answering the questions by retrieving the various attributes of the item listed on the left. This one might expect was an optimal procedure.

Wright and Barnard (1978) found that interchanging the information in the row and column headings improved performance. People found it easier if the questions were in row headings and the items being queried were in column headings. Why should this be? The answer seems to tie less in the correctness than in the appropriateness of the psycholinguistic formulations. Wright and Barnard had modelled their questions on those appearing on a genuine form. Such questions often involve technical terms (such as "dependent") which are explained in accompanying notes. With questions as difficult as this, Wright and Barnard suggest that the form filler finds it convenient to work out the precise meaning of the question just once and then to apply this question to all the items, rather than having to stop and work out what the question means each time it is encountered on a new row. Thus, the theoretical prediction from pure research would relate to textual factors from box 1 (Fig. 1) which differ from those relevant to the practical problem. The difference arises because the complexity of the questions appears to be one of the critical textual variables which determine performance.

4.3. AN APPLICATION TO WARNINGS AND PROHIBITIONS

The above contrast between the utility and irrelevance of certain theoretical notions about underlying processes can also be seen in other applications of psychological research on sentence comprehension. A considerable body of pure research has shown that sentences containing negative elements can be relatively difficult to comprehend (see Clark and Clark, 1977, for an overview of many aspects of negation). Consistent with these basic findings is the evidence that following an instruction such as "Delete what does not apply" is more difficult than an alternative instruction such as "Underline what does apply" (Barnard et al., 1979). Yet performance with instructions containing double negatives has sometimes been found to be better than performance with instructions containing only one negative, although not of course better than fully affirmative instructions (Wright and Wilcox, 1977).

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Again, the critical factor seems to be context. When the instructions refer to making one of two responses in a situation (e.g. pressing either the lefthand or righthand but ton, but always pressing a but ton) then the performance pattern corresponds to that predicted from notions of the difficulty of negative elements. However, in a Go/No Go situation (i.e. where either a single but ton was pressed or nothing was done) performance with the double negative, "Do not press unless . . .", was faster and less error prone than performance with the single negative, "Do not press i f . . . " . Here the critical determinants of performance include the match between the events actually mentioned in the instruction and those subsequently occurring which give rise to a response. This contextual factor appears as influential as the linguistic factor of negativity. Once again it can be seen that before such findings can safely be used to solve practical problems there is a need to set psycholinguistic findings in a framework that could be derived from an expansion of the factors in box 1.

4.4. APPLICATIONS TO INSTRUCTIONS

There have been a number of studies of syntactic variables such as the ordering of clauses, which might lend themselves to practical application. For example, Clark and Clark (1968) showed that people found it easier to remember sentences when the order of mention corresponded to the order in which the events were carried out. People more accurately remembered "He tooted the horn before swiping the cabbages" than "Before swiping the cabbages he tooted the horn". This would seem to have direct relevance to written information such as instructions on application forms. Form fillers are often urged "Before completing this section read note D" or "Be- fore mailing this coupon, check that you have written in your address". Such instructions could all be rephrased with reversal of the clause order. However the form filler's task differs in many ways from the experimental task used by Clark and Clark. It is important to recognise that the form filler may be working with presuppositions which have no counterpart in a sentence retention task. Particular sentence orders may facilitate correcting mistaken presuppositions. Syntactic variants can certainly influence the presuppositions that readers adopt (Anisfeld and Klenbort, 1973). Therefore before rewriting the instructions on forms, there need to be some tests of the generalisability of the Clark and Clark findings. In particular, comparisons of the effects o f different clause orders need to be carried out using tasks that have higher face validity than sentence retention techniques.

The order in which items are mentioned has been found to affect the order in which people carry out an instruction (Wright and Wilcox, 1978), but the relation was not a simple one. If told either Draw a circle with a square above it or Above a circle draw a square, people usually drew the

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circle first. They still drew first the item first mentioned even when the preposition was below, so they were not simply choosing to start drawing from the bottom upwards. Appropriate counter-balancing ensured that it was not just a liking for drawing circles first! The markedness of the preposition did have a considerable effect on which item was drawn first when the instruction was rephrased as Draw a circle above (below) a square. Here people preferred to draw first whichever item was in the above, i.e. un- marked position. Again it remains to be determined how generalisable such findings are. A theory of the comprehension of such instructions might assist in suggesting where the bounds of application might lie, but successful application will also need a taxonomy of instructions which at the very least divides instructions into those where the order of execution is predetermin- ed, "'Fill in the form and mail it" and those where the order is not predeter- mined "Give your phone number at work and home" . In addition it will be necessary to show that the parameters determining performance with instructions on application forms are also relevant when following instructions for operating systems and appliances. The effects of context and presuppositions may be quite different in the two situations.

4.5. AN APPLICATION TO YES/NO QUESTIONS

Because order of mention has been shown to be an important deter- minant of comprehension in a number of pure research studies, it was investigated in the study of application forms by Barnard, Wright and Wil- dox (1979). In addition to examining people's ability to deal with questions on forms that required either deletion or underlining of the appropriate answer, these authors also contrasted formats having the options within the answer statement (e.g. I am married/single) with explicit Yes/No questions (e.g. Are you married?). The results indicated that one of the critical elements was where in the sentence the multiple options occurred. When the options were late in a sentence (e.g. ! have a current insurance certificate for my motorcycle/car.) the multiple-choice type of question was easier to complete than the Yes/No alternative. When the options were early in the sentence (e.g. My motorcycle/car is insured against theft.) then multiple-choice questions were harder than the Yes/No alternative. As expected the order of the information within multiple deletion questions was critical.

This has practical implications for the design of application forms and examination questions. It also invites some cogent statements about the comprehension processes involved in understanding questions that vary in these ways. Nevertheless this example shows that the bridge between applied theories of WHEN certain performance changes occur can sometimes be successfully built from theories of HOW the human information processing

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system operates. Research on the processes underlying comprehension first alerted applied psychologists to the problem of sequencing information. Applied research subsequently confirmed that the variable was real and of significance in a practical situation. The onus is now on the pure psychologists to account more fully for this variation in the relative difficulty of answering Yes/No questions.

4.6. THE APPLICATION OF CLAUSE SEQUENCING

Psycholinguistic studies of multiple embedding (e.g. Blumenthal, 1966) have shown that people cannot accurately answer questions about sentences such as "The man that the girl that the dog chased saw got up". Although such sentences become easier to deal with when the constituents are se- mantically related in unambiguous ways (e.g. "The vase that the girl that the explosion startled dropped broke"), there seems no reason for thinking that such sentence structures would ever become easier for people to deal with than alternative ways of conveying the same information (e.g. "The explosion startled the girl. She dropped the vase and it broke. "). This at least appears to be one research finding that has very wide general applicability. And there are certainly numerous places where application is urgently needed. Almost any insurance document contains such examples as do many public service documents. Some technical writers seem to enjoy developing self-embedded terms. Many of us if asked to pull out the left-hand ignition- element retaining screw pin would have to read the instruction at least twice before we could start. And even then we might not be certain whether to start by looking for the screw on the left of the ignition element or the screw of the ignition element on the left. How much easier to understand the instruction to pull out the left-hand pin on the screw that retains the ignition element.

From the evidence given in section 1, there can be no doubt that there is a real need for the development of guidelines that provide some solutions to the problems of designing written information. Relying on the applicability of the findings from pure research does not seem a sure way to success.

5. The Problems of Developing Applied Theories

5.1. THE NEED FOR TAXONOMIES

In the preceding section it was seen that, although hazardous, predictions about practical applications can sometimes be made from the findings of pure research. Nevertheless, for most applied purposes it seems

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that theories of a different kind are needed. In particular there is a need for developing and strengthening the linkage which in Fig. 1 is labelled Theories of WHEN (see also Macdonald-Ross, in press).

It is obvious from the outset that there will never be a single, all-em- bracing theory of how to design written information. Documents are too diverse, written materials so varied in their structure and purposes that realistically the best that could be hoped for would be a series of smaller theories each dealing with a particular subset of written information (e.g. educational texts, handbooks, operating instructions, etc.). Therefore one of the basic questions is how to determine an appropriate subdivision of the field of written communication. Just how large or how small should the micro-universe be to which our series of small scale theories will apply? What are the procedures available for developing a taxonomy of tasks in the field of written communication?

One of the main difficulties in trying to achieve such a systemisation is that there are so many interactive factors. For example, page size has implications for column width and this in turn is known to interact with the problems of reading aloud illustrations (Burnhill et al., 1976). Conse- quently optimising each variable separately is no guarantee for the success of the final document. Indeed not only are there interactions within many of the antecedants to reading, as has just been shown for textual factors, but the different sets of factors may also interact with each other. For example, different subject populations may achieve specific reading goals in quite different ways.

Kao (1976) in an effort to outline the kinds of research that would be needed if ergonomists saw educational effectiveness as part of their research territory, lists at least 55 factors which would contribute to decisions about the design of information. That there are interactions between many of these factors means that the research effort needed to systematise the functional relations at the level of WHEN particular performance changes occur might be impossibly large. One possible solution comes from a categorisation of task dimensions. The aim would be to group texts and tasks together in such a way that interactions within categories were of no interest. Such groupings reduce the number of factors which need to be considered when seeking to establish the bounds of generalizability of a particular

result. Guidelines as to how such taxonomies can be devised have been put

forward by Fleishman (1972). He points out that the existence of individual differences can be exploited to yield taxonomic groupings. For example, if people who do well on task A also do well on tasks B and C but not on D, E, and F, this affords a rationale for categorising the tasks A, B, C as different from D, E, F. Such categorisation is purely empirical and is carried out irrespectieve of the face validity of the categories formed. A similar

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differentiation of tasks, Fleishman points out, can be achieved by examining the effects of one independent variable across a range of tasks. This was essentially the procedure adopted by Hartley and Davies (1976) when they concluded from their literature review that pre-instructional strategies were useful in some circumstances but not in others. They were useful for meaningful learning when the material was presented in a direct manner which did not involve discovery learning, but such strategies were sub-optimal if either rote learning (i.e. non-meaningful) or discovery learning was involved. It was a similar technique that led Gagn6 to propose the existence of eight different kinds of learning that people might engage in (Gagn6, 1975). Indeed even within the area of instrumental conditioning a strong case has been made for the advantages of continually applying taxonomic revision on the bases of the effects of particular independent variables (e.g. Woods, 1974).

It seems reasonable to suppose that when tasks have been differentiated by such techniques they must be drawing on some different underlying processes. Consequently a taxonomy devised in this way would seem to afford a useful structure into which pure researchers might map their own research findings. By making full use of such classificatory schemes, it is possible that those concerned with the details of the processes underlying comprehension would come to realize that apparently simple questions such as "What happens when we understand sentences?" may be as mischiev- ously wrong-headed as asking "What happens when we learn?"

Such a taxonomy may also offer an antidote to the gloomy prognosti- cations sometimes made both by pure and applied psychologists interested in comprehension. For example, Frase (1975, p. 44) writing about text processing said, "For instructional purposes, for instance, what is required is a task analysis that relates desired learning outcomes to the significant performances that are required of a reader in a specific task. The prospect for a truly general model of a text processing thus seems poor." This pessi- mism of Frase accords with an earlier despondent reflection by Miller (1972, p. 38), "Our central problem is that we do not know how to formulate a theory which will integrate the facts we already have". This was Miller's comment on the crisis in theorising within psycholinguistics. But, it is possible that the difficulty is mainly one of trying to build a single model of the processes of comprehension which will cover the entire water-front. If theorists would settle for viability within a smaller area perhaps progress would be faster. A ground plan for a taxonomy of graphic communications has been proposed by Twyman (1977). Perhaps from an application of the empirical techniques discussed above to such a proposal there might emerge the framework for a theory of WHEN. But the boundaries of such areas need to be empirically determined in the ways suggested above.

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5.2. QUALITY CONTROL APPROACHES TO INFORMATION DESIGN

If the need for relatively small theories is accepted, and if the desirability of using taxonomic classification as a way of deriving general principles is also accepted then there remains the problem of where to start. What would be a useful first step in deriving a heuristic for designers of written information?

One possibility is to think of the production of a piece of written information as subject to the same kinds of quality control processes as the production of other commodities. This metaphor is useful because it enables appropriate control processes to be specified at different stages of production. There will be no need to design one single control process to account for all conceivable contingencies. As a starting point it might be useful to consider the viability of a three-tier control system, with the tiers operating successively. The first tier would be concerned with deriving a specification of the information. This specification would come not only from the writer but also from the user of the information. If the reader of a maintenance handbook wants to know which way up to fit the left-hand, swivel, bundy pipe, is there any need to tell him that this new super-innovatory bundy pipe has been made to the latest international standards?

5.2.1. Finding out what the reader wants to know A recurrent problem in the domain of designing instructions that tell

people how to operate appliances, or how to interact with systems or how to fill in application forms, is that writers seem to expect people to start at the beginning of the written instructions and work systematically through them. None of us does that. In fact there may be only a very limited set of circumstances in which anyone would read any of the instructions at all. The present author once informally asked a group of Cambridge housewives about a list of assorted items such as a camera, washing-machine, electric carving knife, pressure cooker, vacuum cleaner, etc. The items varied along both the cheap-expensive and the safe-dangerous dimensions. The housewives were asked to imagine that they had been given such an item as a present, that it appeared unfamiliar and came with a written set of instructions. They were asked to write down how much of each set o f instructions they thought they would read and why.

The answers showed that at the cheap/safe end of a dimension many people acknowledged that the instructions would not be read at all. One of the main reasons given for ignoring the instructions was that the operation was obvious. For example with items such as a television or vacuum cleaner many housewives insisted that you just switch it on and it goes. Another common reason given for ignoring instructions was the belief that it was quicker to fiddle with the appliance itself (e.g. a pocket calculator).

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At the other end of the dimension where there might be expensive failures (e.g. photography) or risk of injury (e.g. pressure cookers) many housewives again said they would not read the instructions but would "ask somebody to show them". Consequently there appeared to be only a very small range of items where people were willing to acknowledge that they did not have the necessary information and also felt that they had the confidence to read and correctly interpret the instructions. It is probable, of course, that the actual use of the instructions would be even less than the admitted use.

Thus the designer of any written communication can only start the information flow by finding out what it is that the readers think they need. Only then is it possible to start making decisions about style, organization and format. Starting in a reader-oriented way also makes it possible to see that many "reading" situations are in fact question-and-answer dialogues. In developing a scheme for textual analysis this notion of reading as a dialogue has been amplified by Winter (1977). He suggests that successive sentences can be thought of as answering questions which have been raised in the reader's mind by the preceding sentence. Yet even from the outset of the encounter with written information the reader approaches the material with some question in mind. This is true for materials as diverse as the morning newspaper and a psychological journal. Certainly the question being asked by the reader may be rather imprecise such as "Is there anything here that I want to know about?" Nevertheless recognizing that there is a question being asked by the reader might at least alert writers to thinking about providing an answer. Probably newspapers do this rather bet ter than scientific journals. It is not unknown for the latter to hide their list of contents on some back page or print it on the cover in a colour that dis- appears into the background colour chosen for the cover itself.

Recognising that readers often start with questions in mind may help to explain why instructions for machinery are often unsuccessful. Why, in spite of the carefully written step-by-step procedure clearly displayed on the vending machine, it often fails to work. What the user may be wanting to know is why nothing happened when the tea with mi lk but ton was pressed. Since this contingency probably does not arise when the correct procedure is followed, there may be nothing explicit in the instructions which would answer such a question. The user searches the procedures listed, checking against his memory of those he has carried out. Where temporal contingencies are important, e.g. selecting tea before inserting money, such a check to find an omitted procedure may be quite in vain. Maintenance engineers sometimes try solving this problem by posting on the machine a notice which says, "When all else fails read the instructions". Such a notice acknow- ledges that "reading" the instructions was probably not what the user was doing. Perhaps worth exploring as an alternative to changing how readers read, would be to change how writers write.

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As part of this first quality-control stage, decisions must be reached about the overall format. Again a reader-oriented and task-oriented approach is useful. When devising instructions for dyeing fabrics the writer may need to consider the consequences that the reader's wet hands may have on page turning, before deciding whether or not to present the information in booklet form. Indeed it is at this first stage in the design process that decisions must be taken about the appropriateness of using written information at all. Perhaps the information can be linguistic, but should be aural rather than visual. Perhaps the information can be visual, but should be graphic rather than linguistic. At present there seems relatively little empirical research available to guide such decisions. It will be suggested later that the provision of such empirical findings must be part of the long term research strategy of those interested in the effectiveness of communication.

The problem of just how one sets about deriving such a reader-oriented specification for written materials is seldom asked. Indeed for instructional texts it is sometimes suggested that there may be so many different reading purposes for which a particular text might be used that economic factors make the problem insoluble. However it is perhaps a moot point as to whether economic questions can be asked at all unless specific design pro- posals are on the table. Moreover, there may be reasons for thinking that some instructional content can be learned most easily when the readers have been taught the kind of questions to ask (e.g. Larkin and Rief, 1976). It is clearly not very helpful for students to be taught one line of questioning if the text they are using has been organized so as to facilitate answering different kinds of questions. So the problem may not be one of economics or logistics but rather it is perhaps a problem arising from the absence of an established methodology for finding out the questions that readers will ask. Providing readers explicitly with such questions (e.g. via the preinstructional strategies discussed earlier) is perhaps to side-track away from th is particular issue. Such a manoeuvre appears to be an admission by the writer that he does not know what the readers' questions will be so he will invent them himself. This may well be better than nothing, but Frase (1976) has observed that sometimes the subjects' own questioning strategies overrode those the experimenter provided. Outside the context of an experimental task this probably occurs much more often. It is surely a healthy indication that readers are alive and well and waiting to be catered for. The onus is now on applied psychologists to develop the ways and means of setting up the first of the quality control stages in this three-tier system being proposed.

5.2.2. Finding out how to tell the reader The second stage to be considered appears rather more conventional.

There need to be procedures whereby the written material can be vetted for its compliance with all known research recommendations on comprehensibil-

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ity. Perhaps check-lists are all that are necessary. Research findings could then be added to the lists as they became available. Some of the current check list procedures have already been mentioned. For example, Hartley and Burnhill (1977a) drew up a list of 50 guidelines for improving instructional text. Each recommendation in the list had a reference to the research on which it was based, thereby enabling the writer to ask questions about the guidelines.

It might now be argued that the "theory" required from applied research on comprehension is just such a set of check lists. This takes us back full circle to the need for a taxonomy but perhaps it now becomes easier to develop notions about what kinds of items would be common to a variety of different check lists and which of the items have relevance only to more limited areas of communication. For example, sentence length, however defined, will always be a critical parameter when communications are in the form of prose; whereas some ways of organizing information (e.g. simple lists) may be relevant to much more limited domains such as descriptions of sequential procedures. Thus attempts to construct adequate check lists for specific types of communication may help to provide the raw data from which the much needed taxonomy can be derived.

In part the research findings contributing to this second quality control stage are the traditional, applied, laboratory-based comparisons of alternative linguistic options and alternative graphic options (see, for example, the review by Wright, 1977). Nevertheless there remains the question of where these options come from. Macdonald-Ross (1978) has argued that an underused resource in such research is the tacit knowledge of expert practi- tioners. Master performers who can repeatedly produce effective solutions to problems which defeat others, are clearly operating with extremely valuable problem solving heuristics. If empirical research can externalise this knowledge so that it can be examined, perhaps improved, and subsequently com- municated to others then this may hasten the growth of a genuine scientific understanding of how to design communications that successfully communicate. Analysis of master performers is accepted practice in other psychological fields. For example, researchers interested in motor skills have analysed the performance of accomplished musicians (Shaffer, 1976). There seems every reason for thinking that both pure and applied research on comprehension would benefit from analysing genuine expertise in the design of written communications.

Indeed it is almost a corollary of this point that has led to criticism of several of the applied comparisons reported in the literature. Comparisons among sets of incompetently designed materials cannot give rise to reliable and valid conclusions. Macdonald-Ross (1978) writes, "A test of a fairly well-set table against a poor graph and a dreadful pictorial chart is invalid: no general conclusions can be drawn" (Macdonald-Ross, 1978, p. 24). The

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same is true of verbal materials. Knowing that flow charts are an improvement on legal language is no guarantee that they are better than good prose. These problems were touched on in section 3, but again we have come back full circle. However, by now the circle is looking vicious. How can we make comparisons among "good" formats if we do not know which formats are good until comparisons have been made? Perhaps there is no completely safe way out of this dilemma, but certainly it seems fair comment to suggest that applied researchers interested in communication should be concerned to optimise within formats before making comparisons across formats. It is logically necessary to know how to write good prose or how to design a good flow chart before one can ask questions about the circumstances in which one of these formats is more useful than the other.

Taking a long-term and optimistic view it is interesting to note that for the practitioner, i.e. the technical writer or graphic designer, this second quality control stage could in principle become an arm-chair exercise. In other areas there exist ergonomic handbooks which provide a systematization of knowledge about human performance (e.g. Poulton, 1970). When there are handbooks available summarizing the available research on the pros and cons of alternative means of written communication, then the high powered design teams will need only to reach out their hands for the information they need. This arm-chair decision making will never be the case for the first and third stages of the quality control process being proposed.

5.2.3. Finding out i f the communication works The third control stage in the production of a document that will be

considered here is a final evaluation of the draft material. There will never be a substitute for pretesting written material empirically. The quality control exercised during the previous stages will never guarantee that ambi- guities have been eliminated or that the final format of the information is appropriate to the readers' use. Even common words like family can become ambiguous in the context of a welfare benefit form. Is Uncle George who lives upstairs technically "family" or not?

By now it should be clear that the three quality control stages being proposed serve quite different functions and so require different research techniques. The third and final control stage simply asks the question, "Does it work?" Optimising procedures are no longer relevant at this stage. It is essentially a final trouble-shooting session. Neither the research findings of applied psychologists nor those of pure psychologists have any special relevance to this stage. The onus lies primarily on the writer of the document, or perhaps the person commissioning it from the writer, to ensure that the performance of a realistic target population is monitored under realistic conditions. Asking the occupants of the office next door to run

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an eye over a typescript is no way of carrying out this third quality control stage effectively.

Among the things which hamper adequate trouble-shooting procedures or the evaluation of materials are misgivings about methodology. How large must samples be? What performance measures are appropriate? How does one get expertise in designing tests? Although these are generally important questions for researchers, in the context of being the third stage of the kind of quality control procedure being discussed here, they are perhaps far less critical than is usually the case. At this stage one is looking for gross flaws, not for minor refinements. Consequently if the material is shown to just a handful of people who are unfamiliar with the information content this may be a large enough sample. Almost certainly someone in a dozen or so people would have spotted the ambiguity on a welfare benefit form which said "Fill in this section if you are claiming rent rebate or rent allowance". Some applicants thought this was an instruction to fill in the section only if they were already getting the rebate/allowance. Others thought the section was to be completed by those wishing to apply for an allowance. In this instance the designers only needed to find people who did not already know what the instruction was supposed to mean and the confusion would soon have become apparent.

When people from the appropriate target population have been located what do you then do to them in order to get data for this third stage? The answer inevitably varies with the kind of information being evaluated. Un- doubtedly the best and most failsafe technique is to get the material used as it "normally" would be. If it is an application form people can be asked to complete it. If it is a set of instructions people can be asked to carry out the specified procedures. Such tasks give direct evidence as to the adequacy of the written material for its intended purpose. All that is needed is a sensitive observer to note where the readers have problems. No special training is necessary and the use of the term "sensitive" is intended only to indicate a willingness to accept that it is the writer's not the reader's fault when mistakes are made.

The direct approach outlined above is far better than indirect procedures such as asking the reader questions. As we saw in section 2, it is possible to answer questions about nonsense sentences. The correct answer is no guarantee that the material has been understood or that it could be handled appropriately in real life. Nevertheless there are several kinds of materials which do not lend themselves readily to obvious performance tests: leaflets, textbooks, notices giving general information, etc. Here one useful strategy can be to ask people to point out any places where they think others might have difficulty understanding the material. This technique of commenting on difficulties as for a third person, gets round the problem of people being unwilling to say that they could not understand it themselves.

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This unwillingness springs in part from the recurrent tendency to blame readers for getting things wrong. Many people too readily believe that it is their fault, that they must be stupid if they cannot understand what they read. The contrary idea of thinking of some language as the result simply of poor ergonomic design is only very slowly finding a place in public consciousness. Consequently indirect techniques of assessment may need to be very indirect indeed.

This discussion of a quality control approach to the design of information appears to have taken us some distance from our starting point which was the problems of developing applied theories. But the detour was necessary in order to illustrate the existence of several different kinds of research which can all be labelled "applied". These bear differing relations to the development of any theory of information design. They also serve t o illustrate that no such theory will ever have the power to predict the com- prehensibility of specific written materials.

5.3. STRATEGIC AND TACTICAL ISSUES IN RESEARCH ON COMMUNICATION

The division of labour among pure researchers is usually clearly indicated by considerations of a reductionist kind. Those interested in neural mechanisms are aware of their relation to scientists working at the level of psychological constructs, such as those used in analyzing human information processing. Clinical studies provide a meeting point, but for the most part the physiological and the psychological levels remain distinct. However, among applied researchers the differentiation is less well established. To some extent the proposal for a three-stage approach to the design of information offers suggestions as to who does what. Associated with any communication there will be ad hoc, tactical issues which relate to the specification of the content and the evaluation of the final draft. These were stages one and three in the quality control procedure outlined above. The onus for providing the information necessary for these stages would seem to rest with those producing the information rather than with an independent body of scientists.

In contrast, providing and systematizing the knowledge necessary for the success of the second stage is very much the province of independent researchers interested in communication. They will never be in a position to specify what should be said, or even whether what has been said is an effective communication. But their long-term strategic objective is to explore the alternative ways in which something can be said; and to know the circumstances under which one way of saying things is more effective than another.

For the moment let us accept this division of labour between the research of those who are responsible for the production of information and

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the activities of independent researchers (i.e. independent of the need to get an answer by Thursday). What should be the relation between them? One obvious possibility is that the ideal pattern of interaction might be similar to that suggested previously as a useful information flow between pure and applied research. The specification of content, and perhaps also some consideration of the range of viable options, comes from the practitioner. It is this which defines the problem area for applied research. Without this impact it is conceivable that applied research may be carried out with materials as artificial as some of those used in pure research on language comprehension which were criticised earlier. Certainly it is not difficult to find instances (e.g. Wright and Reid, 1973) where the information content used in an "applied" experiment was quite unlike anything people would encounter in daily life. (In the Wright and Reid study people used tables and charts to find out what fictitious space vehicles would be appropriate for particular kinds of interplanetary travel.)

But having started with a genuine problem and having obtained comparative data on possible solutions what does the applied researcher then do? Much of current practice suggests that scientists simply publish the results and turn their attention to the next applied problem. However, in the context of providing a useful input to the designer who is trying to operate the second of the quality control stages outlined above, this is clearly not enough. Such a designer needs to know more than just a bare finding that treatment A was significantly better than B which in turn was significantly better than C. The designer needs to know whether the differences among A, B and C are of practical significance, not just statistical significance in the sense of unlikely to have arisen by chance. For example, if it takes people 1½ seconds longer to find a bibliographic entry in one format than another (Spencer et al., 1975) is this a sufficient reason for recommending that the faster format should usually be that preferred by designers. What of the costs associated with different typographic formats? It is quite unrealistic to expect printers and publishers to accept the findings of applied researchers without considering numerous other consequences that follow from a particular typographic design decision. Nevertheless, the integration of applied findings with factors such as house style, distribution method, limitations of budget, etc. can scarcely begin if the applied researcher abandons his findings once significant "p" values have been obtained. What is needed is an interpretation of the likely consequences of introducing the alternative formats. If bibliographic entries are slower to find does this result in a cost to the system? For example, do more people telephone Directory Enquiries if they cannot easily find an entry in a telephone directory? Would a 1½ second difference in time to find an entry on a page be of any consequence to telephone users where much of the total search time is taken up with finding the right page? Perhaps not.

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The cost-effectiveness might be quite different for operators of a computer controlled visual display unit. Here the time taken by the operator to scan the display may be the major cause of delays in using the system.

The application of research to practical problems, even the application of "applied" findings, is clearly far from straightforward. Macdonald-Ross and Waller (1975) have suggested that there are times when a specialised human intermediary may be necessary. They call this individual a transCbr- rner and liken his role to that of a television producer, whose function it is to co-ordinate the conflicting demands of the many diverse interests concerned with a programme. Varela (1977) used the term "social technologist" in a similar way, although with perhaps rather greater emphasis on the ability to integrate research findings from many sources. This may well be an ex- cellent solution in some fields of communication, but in others it may appear to be inordinately expensive. Perhaps an additional, rather than alternative, solution would be for applied researchers to see it as part of their responsibility to illustrate the cost-effectiveness of the options evaluated in their research. Designers need to be provided with information such as what percentage of the population (or relevant subpopulations such as pensioners) have difficulties using a particular format. Therefore it is evident that in applied studies errors and latency measures may not be interchangeable measures of performance. One measure may be much more useful than the other in terms of its practical significance. Only when working from such practically significant data will designers stand a bet ter chance of being able to incorporate applied findings into their own decision making. Conse- quently one important strategic element of applied research is an evaluation of the practical consequences of those research findings. Without this, the operation of the second control stage discussed above is unlikely to become viable. If the technique for choosing among alternative formats does not become viable then the development of applied theories, no matter how elegant, will do little to solve the problems of the information eater.

6. Obstacles to Interactions Between Pure and Applied Research

Without knowledge there is no power; truth and utility are in ultimate aspects the same.

(Bacon, as quoted in Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 1952, p. 885)

6.1. IS COMPREHENSION A SPECIAL CASE?

Perhaps we should now return to the issues raised in the opening section of the introduction. Are we any closer to seeing what would be at least

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a fruitful if not the ideal relation between pure and applied research in the field of human communication? It has been illustrated that the Baconian approach of trying to derive basic knowledge about comprehension and then hoping that this knowledge can in turn be used to improve communications, is at best hazardous and more often is completely irrelevant. This is because problems specify their own levels of solution. Knowledge about comprehension processes is knowledge at a different level from knowledge about effective typographic formats. That both kinds of knowledge have language as their subject matter is simply a trap for the unwary. H 2 0 may be a similar common subject matter for the chemist and the fireman, but woe betide the fireman who squirts cannisters of hydrogen and oxygen at a blaze. Knowledge existing at different levels of analysis is not that easily interchangeable.

The second viewpoint considered in the introduction was that of those who consider that the safest way of maintaining ecological validity in the development of basic knowledge is to start from the context of an applied problem. Certainly there would seem to be elements of safety in this approach. Nevertheless, it differs in one very important respect from the viewpoint that has been put forward in the present discussion. In advocating an information flow from applied to pure and back to applied it has been suggested that perhaps the most worthwhile starting point is with applied solutions rather than with applied problems. Of course this may mean that some of the psychologically interesting questions have disappeared by the time the solution has been reached. For example, there may have been problems about the reader's ability to combine information from different parts of the text. These problems may no longer be visible when the information is resequenced. But the pure researcher is left with the need to explain how some textual sequences help the reader while others lead to confusion. Such an explanation might then provide an input to future solutions of sequencing problems. Why are solutions rather than problems the preferable starting points? The answer is that a pure scientist faced with the initial communication problem might easily have chosen to examine some other aspect of the information, perhaps its density or its sentence structure or whatever. It is because the results of applied research provide very clear pointers to the variables which powerfully affect human comprehension that they merit being the starting point for the interaction between pure and applied researchers.

The third viewpoint in which pure and applied studies are taken to exist in isolated spheres, was seen to be that which most closely characterized the research on language comprehension which has been carried out during the past two decades. The extent to which this has been an accident rather than a deliberate choice is perhaps a moot point, but it is worth noting that it is not an uncommon feature in many fields of science, es-

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pecially in the behavioural sciences. For example, the opening sentences from a paper given at a conference on Memory were, "Times are changing. The invitation to talk about applied problems in a symposium on memory is something which would have seemed extremely odd only a few years ago" (Baddeley, 1977).

The absence of any meaningful scientific interchange also appears to be true of psychological research on perception and its relation to work on graphic design (e.g. Macdonald-Ross, 1978). Perhaps the behavioural sciences, and psychology in particular, are uncommonly prone to this separation between pure and applied studies. As one small indication of the per- vasiveness of this separation it can be noticed that a recent overview of scientific thinking and theory in psychology finds it unnecessary to mention applied research at all (Monte, 1975). But the attitudes underlying this separation between pure and applied investigations can also be seen in neighbouring fields. The President of the Royal College of Physicians in Britain recently sought to counter both the first two views of the relation between pure and applied work and also the third 'apartheid' view, by writing, "I cannot myself see any radical distinction between scientific elegance and a flair for practical application. This leads me to lay great stress on interaction between basic biology and clinical experience" (Black, 1978). Black continues by pointing out how such interaction has been facilitated by a re- organisation of the research boards within the British Medical Research Council. However at the working level of day-to-day interaction among scientists perhaps there are a variety of factors which foster the separation of the pure from the practical. Society encourages science in its universities. Technological developments are often expected to take place elsewhere. Such distinctions may promote both geographical and ideational separation. Consequently many of the factors affecting the kind of interaction that takes place between pure and applied researchers may not be exclusive to the field of psychology.

6.2. PURE AND IMPURE RESEARCH

Among the factors which discourage interaction between pure and applied researchers must surely be the labels themselves. These labels appear to perpetuate certain value judgments about any particular research effort. They encourage the tacit implication thay any research which is not "pure" might be "impure". To counteract this Whorfian trap, Chapanis (1971) has proposed a nomenclature change, with the terms relevant and irrelevant replacing applied and pure respectively. But even this manoeuvre may perpetuate the conceptual blurring of the criteria for evaluating research. Garner (1972, p. 941) grasped this nettle firmly when he wrote:

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Research should be evaluated on the grounds of efficiency: and the knowledge obtained on grounds of breadth of utility. General knowledge is more valuable than specific knowledge, but this statement is true whether the knowledge has been obtained from pure or applied research. Pure research can be as specific as applied research, and the assumption that pure means general and applied means specific, even though frequently made, seems tenuous at best.

The earlier discussion has several times returned to the problems of drawing general conclusions from both pure and applied studies. In section 3 it was pointed out that pure research could gain from being set within the context of those parameters found useful in applied studies of communication. Such a context helps to make clearer the bounds of generalizability of the cognitive processes underlying comprehension. In arguing for the desirability of greater interaction between pure and applied research, it has been suggested that when underlying mechanisms are understood these may have implications for the taxonomic classification being developed by applied psychologists. Perhaps a clearer understanding of the cognitive limitations imposed by memory processes may suggest ways of categorizing individual differences in ability, or categorizing different communication goals. Therefore greater interaction between pure and applied research has the potential for enhancing the generality of the conclusions to be drawn from both.

Nevertheless, equating general research with good research can also have its pitfalls. Section 5 tentatively explored the relation between those whose research must be specific, the people on whom the onus rests for designing a particular communication, and those whose research is concerned with more general aspects of design. Even here it was clear that it would be quite inappropriate to attach differential "goodness" weightings to the two kinds of research. The ad hoc research could not be classed as inferior in the sense that it should be done away with and replaced by the more general research. Indeed part of the rationale for elaborating on various stages of "quali ty control" in the design of written information had been to emphasize that the findings from general research studies would never be able to eliminate the need for certain kinds of ad hoc testing. Such testing, it was suggested, would inevitably remain an essential part of the evaluation of written materials. In many instances it might also make an important contribution to initially specifying the content of the information that must be communicat- ed. What appears to be needed between these two kinds of applied research is neither rivalry nor denigration but greater communication and collabora- tion. Such interactions could increase that "breadth of ut i l i ty" which Garner saw as the hallmark of worthwhile scientific endeavour.

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6.3. UTILITY AS A DIMENSION OF RESEARCH

"Here's to mathematics. May it never be of use to anyone." So it is said that many mathematical societies throughout the world toast their achievements. Uselessness as a criterion for the scientific value of research has been discussed briefly above, and at greater length and much more competently by many others elsewhere (e.g. Medawar, 1967). But certainly there has been no intention to argue for the opposite view. Research is not necessarily valuable just because it has some direct application. Indeed the dichotomy into useful and useless is itself a mischievous over-simplification. Just as we have illustrated that there is a dimension of research from pure to applied, so the research findings at one point along that dimension may be useful to those working in neighbouring regions. Perhaps it is a weakness that no such dimension is represented in Figure 1, but this choice was deliberate and was taken for several reasons.

One of these reasons was that the independence of theories of HOW and theories of WHY is a present reality. As section 2 showed, pure and applied studies of comprehension differ in almost all aspects of their research procedures. However, the pattern of interaction being suggested here is not simply between the two extreme points on this continuum of research activity ranging from pure cognitive research through applied cognitive research and cognitive applied research to totally applied cognitive ergonomics. The information flow being advocated here, from applied to pure and back to applied, could also take place in smaller, more localised exchanges between neighbouring regions on this continuum. "Utility" may therefore itself be a relative rather than an absolute term.

The second reason why the choice was made not to include links between the pure and applied theories in Figure 1 is because the desire has been to show that interaction would be beneficial, but not to argue that it is indispensable. Theoretical formulations need to develop at a level appropriate to the problem being solved. If the problem is how to design effective written information, the answer must come in terms of variables relating to the content, structure and presentation of the information, rather than being derived from the cognitive limitations of the person who is trying to read, learn or use the information. The separation between the theories of WHEN and HOW was therefore maintained to emphasize a rejection of the popular hope that when we understand how man functions then we will know how to cater to his needs. The provision of effective communication will only be met when adequate applied theories are available. Pure research may sometimes help to sharpen up the applied formulations, particularly where that pure research has had its origins in some practical problem, but such sharpening is only a refinement. The major onus for solving communication problems rests elsewhere. The urgent need is for the development of theories of WHEN.

306

Although the choice not to show the dimension relating pure and applied research was deliberate, the failure to make any differentiation within the box labelled theories of WHEN was simply a matter of convenience. It is undoubtedly misleading to suggest, as perhaps Figure 1 does, that it may be possible to develop a set of functional relations between the antecedants to reading and subsequent performance measures. Only as a very gross approximation is this likely to be true. In section 5 it was pointed out that a taxonomy was needed which would help reduce the overall design problem to more tractable issues. This is apparent simply from considering three of the ways in which written information can fail to be effective. Individual sentences may be incomprehensible. The structure of a sequence of sentences may impair comprehension. The typographic design of the information may mislead the reader. Although not totally independent these are three separate issues, each requiring the development of separate theories of WHEN, each interacting with somewhat different appl ied-pure research fields. This too, illustrates that it is often not meaningful to at tempt to categorise the utility of a particular piece of research. Conclusions based on empirical studies may have the potential for contributing to one or more of the links in the decision chain which results in the design of a particular document. Advocates of the view that some research is more important than others overlook the truism that chains can only be as strong as their weakest links.

In conclusion, let us return to Rothkopf ' s analogy between the meat- eaters and the information-eaters. As section 1 illustrated there is undoubtedly a need for increasing our ability to feed the information-eaters. Perhaps it is now clearer why meeting this need requires greater co-operation between those studying the digestibility of information, those training people to eat more wisely and those who select and blend the ingredients of written communications.

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