In this study 60 first and fourth graders selected pictures that best represented the meanings of sentences read to them. Results indicated that children were instantiating the target words with specific concepts rather than bringing to mind abstract, undifferentiated meanings. (HOD)

Critiques Fleming's proposed alternative to Rubenstein's evidence for phonemic encoding. This reanalysis strengthens the evidence for phonemic encoding and suggests that Fleming's "alternative" should be considered as another source of variance affecting recognition, not as a mutually exclusive alternative to phonemic encoding. (HOD)

To determine whether the writing of certain transformations can predict comprehension of prose written in them, subjects were asked to read three major prose forms, each written in three transformed versions, and to respond to each immediately on cloze tests. (HOD)

Study examined causal priorities between comprehension subskills in three types of readers and found that for most readers word meanings do serve as building blocks of paragraph meaning.

Describes a means of characterizing one of many semantic aspects of young children's comprehension ("necessity for linking"). This semantic aspect is then used to experimentally clarify sentence processing results that are ambiguous at the syntactic level. (HOD)

Reviews "The Nature of Vocabulary Acquisition" by Margaret G. McKeown and Mary E. Curtis. Focuses on three questions involving vocabulary acquisition: (1) What does it mean to know the meaning of a word?; (2) How does knowledge about word meanings develop?; and (3) What is the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and comprehension? (MM)

Investigates the degree to which children and adult readers use semantic and syntactic information sources to increase speed of word recognition and to increase speed of determining sentence meaningfulness. Finds three developmental differences in the speed of analyzing these sentences for words/nonwords versus meaningfulness/nonmeaningfulness.…