Transfer of Fluency Across Repetitions and Across Texts

Three experiments examined transfer of reading fluency across repeated readings of the same text and across related but different texts. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that a paraphrase that altered the syntactic structure of sentences, but not the lexical identity of main concepts or the unfolding of the message, was reprocessed as an unchanged repetition. However, when the paraphrase altered the lexical identity of main concepts, even though the message unfolded in the same manner, there was a loss in the repetition benefit. In Experiments 2 and 3, we demonstrated that there is transfer from a representation of one text to the reading of a second text only if the messages are continuous, not if the passages simply share a large number of overlapping words. The experiments are discussed in terms of the influence of 'episodic' text representations on reading fluency.