This paper provides a general description of schema-theoretic models of language comprehension and examines some extensions of such models to the study of reading. The goal of schema theory is to specify the interface between the reader and the text: to specify how the reader's knowledge interacts with and shapes the information on the page and to…

Forty children listened to stories and then answered questions about temporally neutral and temporally tagged information. Observed interactions among age, additional processing, and kind of information demonstrated the importance of the distinction between these types of information for developmental studies of memory of prose. (Author/DB)

Facility in shifting between familiar schemata in a listening comprehension task was examined in children from the third and sixth grades. Analyses of free recall and interview responses showed deficiencies in children's cognitive monitoring of the prose-schema interaction. (Author/CI)

Two experiments examined children's ability to apply three different standards for evaluating their understanding. Five-, seven-, nine-, and eleven-year-old children were presented with short narrative passages within which were embedded three types of problems (nonsense words, internal inconsistencies, and prior knowledge violations), each of…

The effects of prepassage questions quizzing information of different structural importance on college students' memory for expository prose passages were compared. Results indicated that questions which direct the subjects' attention to material at the top of the organizational structure facilitate the effective encoding of the central…

The first experiment made use of adjunct questions to manipulate the probability that kindergarten and second-grade children would make inferences during comprehension. The second investigated the relative influence of memory for details, memory for explicit information, and age on memory for inferences. (Author/RH)

The relationship between children's knowledge of particular situations and their comprehension of stories about them was investigated. Children in kindergarten and grades two, four, and six heard stories about differentially familiar situations and then answered questions. "Scripts," characterizing knowledge about stereotypical events, were…

Forty-eight pupils from grades one, three, and five participated in a study of the extent to which children are able to use their prior knowledge and expectancies to aid them in integrating verbal material and in drawing appropriate inferences. Six stories were constructed for each of four inference levels, and 11 questions were prepared for each…

The 13 chapters in this book are based on papers presented at the 1974 Indiana Cognitive/Mathematical Psychology Conference, at which contributors were asked to emphasize the relatively broad theoretical significance of their work, to incorporate the work of others, and to speculate about future developments. Topics covered include the nature and…

Several studies have reported adult age deficits in memory for prose materials. Adult age differences in prose comprehension were examined among young and old adults from high or low educational backgrounds. Subjects (N=53) listened to tape-recorded versions of two narrative passages and attempted to orally recall the stories. Subjects were…

This paper develops the thesis that the knowledge a person possesses has a potent influence on what he or she will learn and remember from exposure to discourse. After outlining some assumptions about the characteristics of the structures (schemata) in which existing knowledge is packaged, a theory of the processes involved in assimilating the…

Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of knowledge schema training and text organization on the comprehension and recall of scientific prose. The first experiment tested whether or not knowledge schema training improves processing and recall of a passage on plate tectonics (32 college subjects served as subjects). The second…

This report presents a summary of the research designed to develop a psycholinguistics of comprehension and memory for meaningful written prose paragraphs. The approach departs from most previous ones by seeking to formulate an explicit theory, instead of relying on informal qualitative judgments as to paragraph structure, the scoring of data, and…

Students in Grades six, seven, and eight were asked to integrate existing information and initially unknown answers to prose-related questions for answering superordinate questions. Results suggest that grade level development of hypothetico-deductive skills interacts with instructional prompt levels and that these skills are essential to…