There is accumulating evidence that readers continually evaluate the consistency, congruence, and coherence of text by processes of validation. Validation is initiated immediately on stimulus presentation, may proceed nonstrategically, and serves as a criterion for representational updating. However, validation exhibits a variety of deficiencies.…

A substantial amount of research has focused on children's reading development and reading problems, but in comparison there has been relatively little research into children's reading comprehension. This article provides an overview of the research that has investigated the skills and cognitive processes that support children's understanding of…

To build a coherent accurate mental representation of a text, readers routinely validate information they read against the preceding text and their background knowledge. It is clear that both sources affect processing, but "when" and "how" they exert their influence remains unclear. To examine the time course and cognitive…

The present set of 7 experiments systematically examined the effectiveness of adding causal explanations to simple refutations in reducing or eliminating the impact of outdated information on subsequent comprehension. The addition of a single causal-explanation sentence to a refutation was sufficient to eliminate any measurable disruption in…

The phenomenon of more interference with reading than with listening was replicated using speech-related and nonspeech-related distractor tasks. It is argued that the selective interference effect is due to the relative difficulty of reading over listening rather than to the importance of speech recoding in reading. (Author/RD)

This article presents three studies that investigate when syntactic constraints become available during the processing of long-distance backwards pronominal dependencies ("backwards anaphora" or "cataphora"). Earlier work demonstrated that in such structures the parser initiates an active search for an antecedent for a pronoun, leading to gender…

Two-syllable words were presented singly for study followed by a two-alternative, forced-choice test to 120 college students divided into four groups of 30 each. Half of the new words on the test ("I" words) were constructed by combining two syllables taken from two different study words, and half were neutral words ("C" words). If, as a…

The purpose of Experiment I was to investigate the context effect of letter perception for nonword material. The significance of finding a context effect for nonwords would be that the basis of the effect would have to be a product of a person's knowledge of the phonological or orthographic structure of the language rather than attributable to a…

In a model of the functioning of short term memory, the encoding of information for subsequent storage in long term memory is simulated. In the encoding process, semantically equivalent paragraphs are detected for recombination into a macro information unit. (HOD)

A series of experimental and theoretical investigations of text inference were conducted. One applied a theory of inferable text cohesion to the devising of text structure revisions that assist comprehension and memory. Since only modest success was achieved, the next three projects went beyond text revision to the use of adjunct outlines,…

Applies a taxonomy to a review of the methods used to study mental processes in reading that divides the methods into simultaneous or successive and obtrusive or unobtrusive; the taxonomy proved useful in describing encoding and memory processes. (AEA)

Sixty four college students participated in a study which sought to validate a set of predictions about story memory, derived from a story-grammar approach to comprehension. The grammar describes the higher-order structures regulating the organization and retrieval of incoming story information. These structures, defined by a basic set of rewrite…

The effects of imagery on the recognition of subunits within a textual passage were investigated. College students first rated the subunits of a textual passage with respect to imagery. A different group of subjects was then given the passage to read, and these subjects were subsequently tested for recognition, either immediately or one week…

Sixty of the possible beginning phonemes of English monosyllables were paired with the vowel /a/ in nonsense syllables, and used in illustrative one-syllable words. The sixty manners of commencing words had been scaled in terms of their relative perceptual similarity-dissimilarity in sounds. Both syllables and words were divided into three levels…

Proposing a shift in the locus of theoretical analysis of cognition, this paper argues that cognitive functioning may be more readily characterized without the mediation of long-term mental associations and structure. An account of cognition is proposed in which mental relations are transient functional relations, and in which psychological…