The following variables are expected to significantly influence reading item difficulty as determined within a multiple-choice testing format:

• Negations (Carpenter and Just, 1975)
• Referentials (Abrahamsen and Shelton, 1989)
• Rhetorical organizers (Hare et al. 1989)
• Fronted structures (Freedle, Fine, and Fellbaum, 1981)
  • cleft structures (eg. “lt is true that she found the dog,”)
  • marked topics consisting of several subtypes
  • combinations of the above structures (eg. "But, briefly, this didn't stop him”)
• Vocabulary (Graves, 1986)
• Sentence length (Klare, 1974-1975)
• Paragraph length (Hites, 1950)
• Number of paragraphs (Freedle, Fine, & Fellbaum, 1981)
• Abstractness of text (Paivio, 1986)
• Location of relevant text information (Kieras’, 1985 and Hare et al., 1989)