Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that, when interpreted in context, general terms are typically encoded on the basis of an instantiation. Results indicated that a particular term naming the expected instantiation of a general term was a better cue for recall of a sentence than the general term itself. (CHK)

Four experiments dealt with integration of semantic information while reading. Reading and comprehension time of two related sentences in a text was analyzed according to their proximity and relation within the text. A model of textual comprehension is proposed. (CHK)

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 evidence in support of the ordered search model of word meaning computation in sentence contexts. This model hypothesizes that access to multiple meanings occurs in a fixed order regardless of context. (AM)

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…

Results of a study indicated that adults reading for retention spent more time focusing on syntactic structure, while those reading for immediate comprehension focused more of their time on semantic content. However, the children (fifth graders) used reading strategies that involved mixtures of both of the adult components. (SL)

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)

This research investigates the role of speech recoding, particularly its relationship to meaning analysis during reading. Experiment I documents a speech processing conflict; Experiment II analyzes this conflict; and Experiment III demonstrates contributions of speech and meaning processes to reading memory. Results are related to three classes of…

Experiments were conducted to determine the effects of sentence contexts on word recognition and reading. The questions of whether context is predominantly facilitating or inhibiting and how automatic the influence of contexts is on word retrieval were investigated. (SW)

Five experiments were conducted that illustrate microprocesses of discourse comprehension related to foregrounding. An intermediate case in which prior memories exist but must be reinstated to active memory was studied in detail. (SW)

A schema-based framework for representing knowledge and prose organization was studied. Testing of a script pointer and tag hypothesis confirmed that memory discrimination is better for atypical actions in a passage than for typical script actions and that there is no memory discrimination for very typical actions. (SW)