A study examined the effects of within domain processing on the recall of idea units as well as the potential reversals in performance resulting from the passing of time. Subjects for the experiment were 89 undergraduate students randomly assigned to six conditions related to target words in a reading passage: counting e's, determining the…

The secondary task method is utilized to assess cognitive capacity usage during, and immediately following, interspersed mathemagenic questions of different levels. The method also assesses the relationship between this usage and prose material recalled or recognized from differing positions and different types. The experiment involved 120…

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…

Two studies investigated whether variations in the importance of inferences and the salience of premises within a text would affect the probability that the inference would be made. Six stories of about 500 words were used, with eight variations of each story. The target inference, and its plausibility, was constant across all versions. Inference…

This report examines the theory that when people understand a text, they create a complex scenario (or model) within which the events described might plausibly occur. In order to study construction and revision of such models, five subjects were given difficult-to-understand texts, and were later asked to discuss the processing they went through…

Subjects read a passage and were questioned about the location or content of certain items in the passage. Performance was measured by monitoring response latencies and eye fixations. Apparently the locative information provides an index to the spatial distribution of sentences in the passage. (Author/RC)

The hypothesis that pragmatic inferences presented in text are taken for granted, superficially processed, and not stably or enduringly represented in memory was investigated. Stories were read which in some conditions contained information vitiating the implicational force of explicit inferences. The vitiating information was presented either…

Relations between rank of propositions in descriptive passages, importance ratings, and recall were evaluated in experiments using undergraduates to determine whether passage structure and importance ratings are necessarily related. Importance ratings varied with instructions, but subjects recalled superordinate propositions better than…

Adults read stories; then made plausibility judgments about statements with respect to the stories. The inherent plausibility of the queried statements, the amount of attention subjects focused on information necessary for making a judgment, and the interval between presentation of the relevant information and the test probe were varied.…

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…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 17 titles deal with the following topics: the effects of preinstructional activities on the learning and retention of prose; the interaction of picture and print in reading instruction; the perception of structure in scrambled…