This article considers the role of the basic cognitive unit, called the "story engram," in young children's learning to read, including children ranging in ability from severe mental retardation to giftedness. It illustrates how the "Ball-Stick-Bird" method of beginning reading can facilitate this process because of the…

This paper considers the process by which humans are able to select from the complex string of sounds impinging on the ear and understand certain frequency combinations to be linguistic signals while other combinations are not. A brief review of the complex subcortical region, particularly the known but seldom studied reticular system, indicates…

Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation as a fundamental human experience and activity. It is also the interpretation of meaning, the realization that human expression contains a meaningful component which must be recognized as such and transposed into one's own system of values and meanings. It describes what seems to happen in conversation,…

This paper explores the concepts of representation and response as illustrated, first, by "seeing-in" (Wollheim, 1980, 1987) or by the "reading" of a painting in which the viewer regards a particular painting from different perspectives and angles. In both instances, the reading involves a dual engagement with the substance and the medium. This…

The domain of second language reading is a rich source for insights into bilingual cognitive processing. Most cross-language transfer research has been carried out on acquisition and production of second-language (L2) structures. Relatively little work has been done on cross-language transfer in bilingual reading. An overreliance on top-down,…

Since E.L. Thorndike's landmark 1917 study of the complexity of reading comprehension, inferential research has generally focused on either inference as a developmental process or the nature of inferences made during reading. In his 1930 study, R. W. Tyler established that inference could be objectively measured. S. G. Paris conducted several…

Through instruction in synaptic linking--the process of relating ideas and information to produce expanded interpretations and new constructs--teachers provide students with a model for answering higher level questions about their reading material. Presenting a carefully planned sequence of reading comprehension questions that require skills…

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…

The performance of 57 Mexican American bilingual college students on Spanish and English versions of problem solving tasks was investigated. The tasks included word recognition, sentence verification, reading span, syllogisms, and reasoning. The results indicated that the subjects used similar cognitive skills in performing both the Spanish and…

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that graphs convey information effectively because they can display global trends as geometric patterns that visual systems encode easily. A novel type of graph was invented in which angles/lengths of line segments joined end-to-end represented variables of rainfall and temperature of a set of months. It was…

A study was conducted for additional support of the view that bridging--drawing inferences to relate a sentence to a preceding sentence--occurs during reading rather than at the time of testing. Subjects were 88 third and 67 fifth grade students whose reading proficiency was measured by performance on the Metropolitan Achievement Test. The…

A study was conducted (1) to determine if children select some strategies more frequently than others to comprehend story categories, and (2) to find out if children are able to talk about what they are thinking and doing as they read stories from a basal reader. Subjects, 30 second grade students reading at grade level, were randomly assigned to…

Resarch on discourse comprehension in adulthood has yielded inconsistent findings. Some studies have reported age-related differences in comprehsnion and recall while others have found no differences between younger and older adults. To examine the recall style of younger and older adults, a narrative was presented to 40 younger (mean age=18.73…

A study investigated the relationship between high and low reading ability and the study techniques of reading, the usual method of note taking, and student-generated paragraph summaries on the six levels of cognitive learning from textual material as measured by Bloom's "Taxonomy." Subjects, 84 college students enrolled in an…

Because teachers are asking for specific suggestions to help students apply comprehension skills and read content material, a mechanism that assists students in acquiring and applying specific comprehension skills as they read content texts is being investigated. The mechanism is called marginal gloss because learning activities are placed in the…