One hundred twenty-three fifth grade students participated in a study that investigated the role of prosodic cues in children's comprehension of discourse. The subjects, both good and poor readers, read, listened to, or read and listened to a story in one of four modes of visual and auditory presentation: (1) no audio, (2) normally intoned, (3)…

Two studies were conducted to clarify some problems in aptitude treatment interaction research, by concentrating on the macroprocesses in reading required by different instructional methods and the macroprocesses available to students. In the first experiment, three reading groups were used, the first receiving adjunct questions, the second also…

The "practical" approach currently emphasized in teacher education is critically appraised and contrasted with a more "intellectual" approach. It is suggested that more emphasis on intellectual activities is needed in teacher education and a number of arguments are presented to support a change in that direction. It is suggested that the quality…

Recent developments in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence have shown that various types of prior knowledge play important roles in understanding during text processing and have resulted in a new kind of model for conceptual processing, "procedural semantics." This paper discusses two types of units, or schemata, which,…

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…

The analysis of story recall, a device used widely in reading research to gauge comprehension, typically involves a process of mapping recall against the original story. The process is based on the assumption that subjects are aiming for verbatim recall. To test the validity of this assumption, an analysis was conducted of 20 narrative retellings,…

In light of conflicting and limited results in the assessment of the effects of text-forming structures, a study investigated the effects of specific microlevel and macrolevel text-forming elements on readers' comprehension of selected passages of scientific technical prose. More specifically, the study examined the individual and combined effects…

Two experiments were conducted to determine the features of text to which skilled adult readers need to attend while reading and the features that either are of minimal importance or can be processed automatically without directed processing. In the first experiment, 12 college students attended to a timed picture naming task, in which a picture…

A study examined the effects of prior knowledge and the explicitness of text connectivity on various measures of reading ability. Subjects were 130 eighth grade students who read 6 prose passages that had been manipulated for content familiarity and for use of explicit connectives and implied connectives (those brought about by the author's…

Arguing that skilled reading is the result of the successful acquisition of a number of highly automatic component processes that operate together in an integrated manner, this paper describes a series of studies of good and poor high school readers representing three general domains of processing: decoding, analyzing and comprehending text, 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…

Thirty-six students participated in a study of a program designed to help first-year medical students construct an ideational scaffolding as they attempted to understand their texts. They were divided into two groups: an experimental group that was given an instructional program on how to develop a hierarchical structure while reading, and a…