Purpose: The purpose of this meta-analysis was to investigate the effects of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) interventions that included aided AAC input (e.g., aided AAC modeling, aided language modeling, aided language stimulation, augmented input) on communicative outcomes (both comprehension and expression) for individuals with…

In this review, we lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary conversation between literacy education research and relevant neuroscience research. We review recent neuroscience research on correlates of proposed cognitive subprocesses in text decoding and reading comprehension and analyze some of the methodological and conceptual challenges of…

The many authors debating whether computers can understand often fail to clarify what understanding is, and no agreement exists on this important issue. In his Chinese room argument, Searle (1980) claims that computers running formal programs can never understand. I discuss Searle's claim based on a definition of understanding that is empirical,…

A discussion of the application of artificial intelligence to natural language processing looks at several problems in language comprehension, involving semantic ambiguity, anaphoric reference, and metonymy. Examples of these problems are cited, and the importance of the computational approach in analyzing them is explained. The approach applies…

Arguing that the failure of instructional materials is frequently due to misconceptions held by their developers concerning the nature of comprehension, this chapter examines the factors involved in comprehension and relates them to the design of instructional materials. Three types of errors in comprehension are discussed, and ways to avoid them…

Semantic theory, its relationship to comprehension, the nature and function of semantic memory, and results of some research on semantic memory and bilinguals are discussed through a review of recent literature. The findings discussed seem to confirm these general observations regarding semantic memory and bilinguals: (1) there is integration and…

Two kinds of perspectives governing the provision and preservation of knowledge, a universal and an ecological perspective, are discussed in this paper. In the first case, scientific observations are represented through a semantic interpretation of facts. This is illustrated with a series of experiments on semantic feature perception in the recall…

The skilled performance of conference interpreters has aroused some interest of late, both on the part of interpreters interested in studying their own complex skills, and of psychologists interested in cognitive behavior. Recent theories in this field have concentrated on information processing aspects of the task, and on the role of anticipatory…

A study of eight adult chronic aphasic patients' comprehension of sentences and pictures in which comparisons of time and space were crucial was designed to assess A. R. Luria's approach to designing comprehension test tasks. The investigation required patients, with lesions of varying size and location, to determine whether a sentence expressing…

Like legal language, medical language is a private language, a separate stratum containing some words specially defined for medical purposes, some existing only in the medical vocabulary, and some adding precision or solemnity. These characteristics often cause a breakdown in patient-doctor communication. Analysis of data obtained from prototype…

Artificial intelligence research on natural language understanding is discussed in this report using the notions that (1) natural language understanding systems must "see" sentences as elements whose significance resides in the contribution they make to the larger whole, and (2) a natural language understanding computer system must…

This book concludes a six-volume review of research and theory on learning and cognition. Its six chapters cover the following topics: theories of semantic memory, comprehension and memory of text, coding processes in memory, perceptual learning from reading, speech perception, and the organization and core concepts of learning theory and…

Two research areas, schema theory and linguistic theory, are described which have contributed to theories about language comprehension. Models of language comprehension conceptualized by Roger Schank, Carl Frederiksen, and Walter Kintsch are discussed in relation to the research and evaluated for practical use in reading instruction. (Author/PP)

Recent studies on schema theory and other concepts related to reading comprehension are discussed in this paper. Noting that the psycholinguistic model of reading views reading as a process of predicting meaning based on the reader's prior knowledge of language, the paper describes recent research that has led to a definition of reading…