An experiment investigated the retrieval processes involving a noun with an adjective. Results suggest that a noun's meaning is retrieved in conjunction with an adjective when the phrase describes a familiar concept. (Author/AM)

Presents study designed to further evaluate the nature of spoken-language comprehension under conditions of varying perceptual load by manipulating different comprehension conditions. Investigates effects of subsidiary task paradigms on course of simultaneous comprehension processing. Argues that these can only be used when accompanied with probes…

Assumptions about comprehension of utterances are challenged in two experiments using as an example the verb phrase "to do a Richard Nixon on a tape" (i.e., erase it). It is argued that creating meanings, as with this phrase, works differently from selecting senses for utterances and that many require a mixture of the two. (MSE)

Describes three experiments designed to investigate the effect of sentence organization on the comprehension of procedural directions. Ease of comprehension was determined by measuring reading time for two different sentence patterns, while subjects followed instructions to operate an unfamiliar device. Experimental results showed that…

Describes two experiments where readers were asked to restore missing actions and physical and mental states to short narratives. Although some deletions resulted in violations of the event chain taxonomy while others did not, in both cases readers used knowledge of possible causal sequences to repair gaps in stories. (Author/MES)

Discusses the nature of individual differences in working memory and presents the span test that was used to assess working memory capability. Next it discusses how working memory capacity might influence two specific components of reading comprehension, retrieving facts and computing pronominal references. (NCR)

Investigates the role of story schemata (setting, theme, resolution, plot, etc.) in adults' metacognitive monitoring of overall knowledge of stories. (EKN)

Presents study focusing on creation of referential ties during comprehension and the effect of a text's global structure on this process. Results show that manipulations of distance between two referentially linked propositions and the structural height of the earlier proposition influence the ease with which comprehension occurs. (Author/BK)

Five studies were carried out to analyze role of short-term storage in reading of organized text. By interrupting the subject's reading with a distractor task, information that was being carried in short-term storage was removed. It was found that this interruption effect could be countered by giving the subject the last one or two sentences that…

Studies the much-debated issue of the role of rote, repetitive rehearsal (maintenance rehearsal) on the establishment of memory traces that outlast the rehearsal process itself. Results show that there is an effect of maintenance rehearsal on long-term recognition performance and that this effect depends on the mental resources devoted to the…

Describes two experiments testing the hypothesis that thematic titles largely relieve the reader of the task of constructing a sense from coherent texts. Finds that such titles significantly increase free recall of structured or slightly disorganized texts, while only prolonged reading allows titles to raise recall of an unstructured text. (MES)

Presents study performed to clarify the role that imagery plays in sentence understanding. Results show that reading selectively interferes with comprehension of high-imagery sentences and demonstrates that sentence comprehension is not a process that is independent of the decoding stage. (Author/BK)

Three experiments were conducted to study the inferencing processes involved in anaphoric reference. Results show that an anaphora activates both its referent and concepts when in the same proposition as the referent, and that all three, when in the same proposition, are connected in the long-term representation of a text. (PJM)

Examines whether, after a single reading, the recall of text elements depends on the length of the passage. Results show more detail was remembered 23 hours later for short passages than for long. Concludes that negative effects of passage length on test performance were due in part to acquisition processes rather than retrieval. (EKN)

Examines the reasons for differences in conclusions about the way conditional sentences are comprehended. (AM)