The study evaluated the relative importance of graphic and contextual information in the correction behavior of disabled fourth grade readers who were clinically diagnosed as poor comprehenders. Results indicated that poor comprehenders tended to be more cued to graphic constraints in the text than to semantic constraints. (Author/DB)

Forty young adults with mental retardation (MR) were compared to 40 young adults without mental retardation in tests examining postpractice interference effects in naming colors of Stroop words. The study concluded that practice developed automatized reading suppression responses which held greater cognitive inertia for longer periods among MR…

A transactional investigation of reading considers comprehension to be more than the duplication of the author's message. Rather, it entails the readers' interpretation of the textual representation that he or she has constructed. Thus, researchers must ask how the reader duplicated the author's creative role. The goal, in other words, is to…

Phonological awareness is explored as a process for studying the cognitive deficits of dyslexic children without undermining the assumption of specificity. Discussed are the operation of Matthew effects, the importance of strict psychometric criteria in dyslexia definitions, and recognition that dyslexia represents an arbitrary criterion in a…

Ten children (ages 7-10) with visuoperceptual problems were compared to sighted children on lexical decision tasks with words, nonwords, and format distorted items. The partially sighted children relied on phonological mediation as well as the "visual" route in word recognition. Regularity effects, as well as effects of intact and disrupted…

Text analysis systems, imposing coherence measures derived from the reader's and writer's notions of how a text functions in communication, produce descriptions of texture, or the totality of cohesive ties in a text. The question is if cohesion analysis, more than offering a linguistic description of text, can serve as a psychological model of…

As comprehension failure results whenever readers are unable to infer missing causal connections, recent comprehension research has focused both on assessing the inferential complexity of texts and on investigating students' developing ability to infer causal relationships. Studies have demonstrated that texts rely on four types of causal…

In an increasingly technological society, there is a social need for designing communication technology around the perceptual abilities and cognitive strategies of people. A growing demand for information has created additional pressure on emerging communication technologies to provide electronic alternatives to the printed page. Design depends…

Investigates the extent to which learning disabled readers' atypical encoding relates to their deficiencies in semantic memory by comparing learning disabled and nondisabled readers in two age groups on dichotic listening tasks that included orienting and nonorienting instructions. (HOD)

Reviews the research on how readers or listeners construct mental models of the situation a writer or speaker is describing. Narrative components and spatial models are discussed. (YP)

Readers as well as writers compose meaning. Using the same characteristics essential to effective writing--planning, drafting, aligning, revising, and monitoring--readers react creatively with the text. In response to the author's intention and their own knowledge base, they decide what they want to get from their reading. Constantly renegotiating…

In the study of perception during reading, the use of eye movement contingent control of the stimulus display has proved to be a useful research technique. With such a system, it is possible to experimentally manipulate, in real time, the characteristics of the stimulus display that is present on selected fixations as reading is in progress and to…

This report describes research that focused on the comprehension and composition of simple texts. The first section reviews the overall goals and theoretical perspectives of the project. The second section describes the following studies carried out during the project: analysis and extension of prior thinking-out-loud (TOL) data, TOL and reading…

A study examined whether (1) there are untested indices of difficulty that can be used to enhance the accuracy of readability formulas, (2) the same readability formula can be used to assess the readability of text for mature and immature readers and for good and poor readers, and (3) some one model of the reading process or some synthesis of…

Describes two experiments that examined word recognition processes of second, fourth, and sixth graders. Shows that older children use meaning frequency to narrow the amount of information kept active following word recognition. (HOD)