Children in grades 1 to 8 were given picture-word pairs and were asked to say whether the items rhymed, in a sound task, or "went together," in a meaning task. It was concluded that children can get meaning from printed words without the use of an intermediate phonemic code. (Author/JMB)

Children in grades 1, 3, and 5 were asked to decide whether selected contradictory sentences were true or false. The age at which children were first able to evaluate the false sentences correctly corresponded to the relative speed with which adults evaluated the sentences in a timed vertification task. (Author/JMB)

This study employs a lexical-decision task to investigate second- and fourth-grade children's use of semantic context in word recognition. Results showed that younger and poorer readers benefit at least as much from semantic context in word recognition as do older and better readers. (Author/JMB)

The release-from-proactive-inhibition technique was used to assess the effects of mode of presentation and presentation rate on the development of elementary school children's ability to use the evaluative dimension of the Semantic Differential as an encoding device in short-term memory. (Author/JMB)

Third- and sixth-grade readers were asked to label sets of pictures printed with distracting words (either nouns, adjectives, or functors) and nonsense syllables. (Author/JMB)

This study examined 2,570 Chinese characters taught in Chinese elementary schools. Findings indicated that visual complexity, phonetic regularity, and semantic transparency of characters increased from early to later grades. Characters introduced in first/second grade contained fewer strokes but were less likely to be regular or transparent than…

Studied bilingual children and children learning a second language using a picture-word interference task. The printed distractors interfered with naming both on trials where the distractor and naming language were the same and on trials where they were different. These and other results question whether an "input switch" operates for bilingual…

A sample of 80 first- and second-grade children selected to represent four levels of reading competence were tested in their recognition of semantic, syntactic, and lexical change in sentences previously decoded during prose reading. (JMB)

Two experiments compared the abilities of third and sixth graders and adults to recognize sarcasm given context and intonation cues. Children recognized sarcasm only when given a speaker's sarcastic intonation cue, even when context strongly indicated a nonliteral interpretation. (BC)

Younger and older children were asked to label pictures of nonprototypic, container-like objects in an effort to test Nelson's theory regarding the primacy of the functional core in young children's meaning structures. Contrary to expectations, the older, intermediate age children were influenced more by functional context than were the younger,…

Analyzes the roles of verbal coding skills, processing efficiency, and memory ability in accounting for individual and developmental differences in the reading comprehension of children in grades 3 through 8. Results indicate that skill differences can arise through ability differences at two independent levels--processing speed and memory.…

Explores issue of whether beginning readers proceed from print directly to meaning, or whether they need to use phonological information to obtain access to the meaning of printed words. As derived from a group of children between seven and 12, results indicated that, at least at low levels of reading skill, intermediate phonemic codes are used in…

Determines some reasons that children may ignore detected inconsistencies in judging story adequacy. Results indicate that factors specific to a story and the construction of its internal representation, contribute to the judging and monitoring performance of children. (RJC)