A group of 144 kindergarten and third grade students heard stories in which the information necessary to infer the protagonist's motives was varied as to its form and location in a story sequence. In all story variations, the semantic content of the information was held constant. All children completed three tasks: a moral judgment concerning the…

Recent research in reading comprehension suggests that there are substantial differences between individuals in their patterns of resource allocation to text-based (bottom-up) and knowledge-based (top-down) reading processes. Less able readers tend to overrely on processes in one direction, producing deleterious effects on comprehension. Factors…

This paper studies the relationship of artificial intelligence (AI) to the study of language and the representation of the underlying knowledge that supports the comprehension process. It develops the view that intelligence is based on the ability to use large amounts of diverse kinds of knowledge in procedural ways, rather than on the possession…

The current status of conceptions of learning in children is reviewed and some areas of neglect are considered in this paper. The main premise is that although considerable strides have been made in the understanding of the learning process, essential developmental formulations of growth and change have been poorly articulated. It is suggested…

A study investigated the separate and combined effects of the syntactic organization of the sentence, the contextual framework in which a message is embedded, and the readers' past experiences on children's inferential reading comprehension of pragmatic cause/effect statements. The subjects, 144 fourth grade students, were asked to specify the…

The comprehension and recall of instructional text is heavily dependent upon the contexts in which information input and retrieval occur. College students (N=44) recalled the contents of a hierarchically structured text immediately after study and again six weeks later. Total meaningful recall was better when the superordinate concepts, or cues,…

Forty first-grade children and 40 fourth-grade children participated in a study that sought to determine if age-related increases in memory for prose are due, in part, to deliberate mnemonic strategies and if older children use the higher-order relations in prose more efficiently than do younger children. Each child listened to a tape-recorded…

This study attempted to prove a dichotomy between cognitive processes as measured by Piagetian reasoning tasks and those measured by traditional intelligence tests. A battery of tests (Slosson Intelligence Test, Durrell's Silent Reading and Listening Comprehension Test, Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices, and the Piagetian Measure of Cognitive…

Early psycholinguistic investigations were based on linguistic theory (primarily Chomsky's transformational theory) as a model of competence. Recent studies have suggested that naive language users neither make the same linguistic judgments as the theorizing linguists nor productively follow the linguistic rules, and that nonlinguistic knowledge…

To determine to what extent children of preschool age comprehend the meaning of logical connectives, 64 5- and 6-year-olds were told to hand differently colored and shaped wooden blocks to an experimenter. The commands involved various English idioms used for conjunction (e.g. both black and round), disjunction (either black or round), and…

Reported is an Aptitude Treatment Instruction (ATI) Study designed to evaluate the aptitude of verbal comprehension in terms of two unitary complex science diagram types: a single complex block word diagram and a single complex picture word diagram.. ATI theory and research indicate that different effective instructional treatments tend to help…

A recent finding that good and poor readers may bring different response patterns to the reading task comes from a pilot study in which so-called good readers achieved a higher score on a comprehension test than did poor readers, even when they had not had a paragraph or story to read as a basis for answering the questions. This study was a more…

Reading is a process in which written language conveys meaning between writer and reader. The reader uses graphic, syntactic, and semantic cues to get to the meaning. This study examines the reading process of 94 subjects with proficiency levels ranging from low second grade to high tenth grade using the Goodman Taxonomy of Reading Miscues. The…

Limited evidence suggests that different kinds of inserted questions may be differentially effective in promoting learning from text. In this experiment one of four groups had inserted knowledge-level questions and a second group, comprehension questions. It was argued here that: (1) in previous adjunct-question research, treatment groups have…

The goal of this project was to develop a sequential program for the development of critical thinking skills that could be extended to all the elementary schools in the school district. The major objectives were: (1) to enhance teachers' ability to think critically, practice in their classrooms teaching strategies to develop pupils' thinking, and…