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)

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)

Reading comprehension is an active inferential process. Three experiments are described in which the possibility was examined that highly probable inferences are drawn, even when they are unnecessary for comprehension. (Author/RM)

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)

Three experiments investigated a characteristic of the propositions that underlie sentences. For some of the sentences tested, the same concepts occurred repeatedly across the underlying propositions; for others, concepts were seldom repeated. Repetitions were shown to facilitate sentence processing. (Author/RM)

An experiment is reported which permitted the separate examination of sentence comprehension processes and subsequent sentence memory processes. The similarity between the results of comprehension and recall was discussed in terms of a retrieval process that may be similar in both tasks. (Author/RM)

Four versions of several paragraphs had the same second sentence and were referentially coherent, but they differed in causal relatedness of the two sentences. Results showed that despite referential coherence, recognition and recall memory for the causes was poorest for the most and least related causes and best for causes of intermediate…

This study examined how people use inferences to aid comprehension of connected discourse. (Author/RM)

A study was made to assess the effect of comprehension on the recognition of meaning and wording changes with concrete and abstract sentences. The results of the experiment were discussed in light of recent models which propose different storage mechanisms for concrete and abstract sentences. (Author/RM)

Comprehensibility ratings and sentence-by-sentence reading times of three-sentence narratives (triples) were studied as a function of the coherence of a triple. In both experiments, reading times did not differ for first sentences, but were longer for third sentences of unrelated than for related triples. (Author/RM)

A general theoretical framework for studying the representation of prose in memory is presented. The framework emphasizes the relational structure of story characters as determined by major story themes and provides for empirical consideration of author-reader communication. (SW)

Discusses a sequential, three-stage model of how nonliteral expressions are understood, as proposed in recent linguistic, philosophical, and psychological studies. Testing the model's implication that nonliteral meanings of sentences are ignored whenever literal meanings are plausible, finds evidence that both meanings are processed simultaneously…

Memory representations of statements from a story were predicted to cluster into separate episode chunks in memory. It was shown that the recall of episode depends on the length of that episode, but not on the lengths of other episodes. The chunking idea was confirmed. (SW)

A technique was devised for constructing a text story which subjects agreed matched the dialogueless movie "The Red Balloon" in episodic structure. It relies partly on subjects judging where episodes and their components were located in the stories. Differences in content in movie and text recall are discussed. (SW)

Five experiments are described that detail both the structure of lexical representations accessed in visual word recognition and the method of parsing words in order to access these representations. The results support a system of lexical access that is not mediated by phonological encoding. (SW)