Models of question asking predict that questions are asked when comprehenders experience cognitive disequilibrium, which is triggered by contradictions, anomalies, obstacles, salient contrasts, and uncertainty. Questions should emerge when a person studies a device (e.g., a lock) and encounters a breakdown scenario ("the key turns but the bolt doesn't move"). Participants read illustrated texts and breakdown scenarios, with instructions to ask questions or think aloud. Participants subsequently completed a device-comprehension test, and tests of cognitive ability and personality. Deep comprehenders did not ask more questions, but did generate a higher proportion of good questions about plausible faults that explained the breakdowns. An excellent litmus test of deep comprehension is the quality of questions asked when confronted with breakdown scenarios.

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One dimension of reading literacy involves the tracking of agents associated with the text. In a literary short story, there is a society of character agents and pragmatic agents. This study investigated the relative salience of different classes of agents in memory. Two experiments measured source memory as an index of agent salience in long-term memory. Patterns of source memory scores supported an invisible third-person narrator hypothesis and an agent amalgamation hypothesis, but not a structural prominence hypothesis: First-person narrator > nonnarrator character > third-person narrator > 0. Statement detection parameters did not significantly differ among the 3 classes of agents, so differences in source memory could not be explained by differences in the content of the speech acts. Source memory scores also could not be explained by surface features of the text, differences among readers, and sophisticated guessing on the basis of a story abstract.Comprehenders potentially construct multiple agents in their cognitive representations when they read a story. Each agent has human qualities, such as speaking, perceiving, believing, knowing, wanting, liking, acting, and experiencing emotions. For example, the characters in a story constitute one ensemble of agents. The protagonists and antagonists are presumably more salient than the minor characters and those agents who are functionally props. Another ensemble of agents, called the pragmatic agents, participate in a one-sided communication from the narrator to the narratee, or from the author to the reader. The narrator is the agent who presents the story to an imaginary addressee or recipient, called the narratee. The author is the actual person who writes the story, whereas the reader is either an actual or virtual reader of the story. Some of these pragmatic agents are presumably low in salience (if not invisible) to the reader, although the relative salience of these agents has never been tested empirically. The present study was designed to test some hypotheses about the relative salience of different classes of agents in long-term memory.The pragmatic agents have a functional role in all text genre, not just stories. In fact, one of the important dimensions of reading literacy addresses the status of these