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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Experiments were done for comprehension and recall using short English texts with a controlled number of words and propositions but differing in the number of word concepts in the text base. Reading time was longer and recall less for texts with more word concepts. (SC)

A study is reported in which short-term memory capacity, estimated by a probe digit task, and memory for structured language, measured by a probe discourse task, were investigated in an experiment with third and fifth grade IQ-matched children representing two levels of reading comprehension skill. (Author/RM)

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)

Research supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. (RS)

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…