Abstract
Anxiety, compensatory strategies and reading comprehension: processing deficit vs. lack of confidence. The processing deficit and the lack of confidence hypotheses were tested in order to explain why high-anxiety subjects are more likely than low-anxiety subjects to make regressive fixations and to reduce reading speed. Subjects high or low in test anxiety read texts with (a) regressive fixations and self-paced reading allowed, (b) self-paced reading (no regressive fixations), and (c) fixed-pace reading (no regressive fixations or self-paced reading). Results indicated that (a) high-anxiety subjects made more regressive fixations and read more slowly than low-anxiety subjects; (b) comprehension performance was higher with regressive fixations than with self-paced reading, and it was poorest in the fixed-pace condition; and (c) there were no comprehension performance differences as a function of anxiety in the regressive fixations and the self-paced conditions; in contrast, high-anxiety subjects showed greater impairment than low-anxiety subjects in the fixed-pace condition. The more frequent use of regressive fixations in high-anxiety can be explained by the lack of confidence hypothesis, whereas the additional reading time can be accounted for by the processing deficit hypothesis.
