Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Perceptual disfluency of a text can operate as a desirable difficulty, presumably because it leads to better comprehen-sion. However, little is known about what cognitive mechanisms support this benefit. Here, we investigate whether sustainedattention, as measured by reports of mind wandering (i.e., lapses in attention) during reading, mediates the relationship be-tween disfluency and text comprehension. We manipulated the typeface (fluent: Arial; disfluent: Comic Sans) of two textson research methods. A total of 208 participants recruited online read either one of these texts, either in a fluent or disfluenttypeface, followed by a series of text level and inference level comprehension questions. We found that mind wandering wasless frequent when participants read disfluent text. Importantly, our results show that the relationship between disfluency andtext level comprehension was indirectly mediated by mind wandering, suggesting that sustained attention is one of the cognitivemechanisms by which disfluency influences comprehension.