Evidence is provided to refute the suggestion, made by Macnamara et al. (1976), that four-year-old children perform logical operations corresponding to formal logic upon the sentential components of implicative verbs to produce indirect implications. It is argued that children use past knowledge plus additional premises to derive indirect…

Presents a rebuttal to Hidi and Hildyard's (1976) criticism of Macnamara et al.'s (1976) assertion regarding the ability of four-year-old children to grasp implicatives and presuppositions. (AM)

Recent research in the area of prose comprehension is reviewed, including factors that affect amount of recall, representations of text structures, and use of world knowledge to aid comprehension. The need for more information processing models of comprehension is emphasized. Elaboration is considered important for comprehension and retention.…

The article defends the teaching of philosophy at elementary and secondary levels and examines some existing precollege philosophy curricula; special attention is given to the American Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children and a Canadian effort to establish moral education in the schools. (SB)

Phenomena are examined to support the conception that cognitive structures continue to reflect the numerous ways of apprehending the world that blend to some degree into each other. (AMH)

Reports on a study designed to: (1) produce a multiple-choice test which would measure children's comprehension of figurative language, and (2) obtain information about the development of figurative language comprehension in children. (Author/AM)

There is evidence to suggest that mature students learn particularly effectively in a problem-solving environment, and that they appear to be especially responsive to analogies and metaphors. Three examples are given of domains where the student has to convert a formulation into an equivalent diagram. Arguably, the process of performing this…

Reports on research into the interactive roles played in the verbal comprehension processes by the sequence of textual elements, text-specific prior knowledge, and levels of language proficiency. Four cloze tests were administered to undergraduate and graduate native speakers of English and to undergraduate non-native speakers of English at three…

Investigated children's understanding of meaning of the cognitive verb "know" (as defined by an abstractness and conceptual difficulty hierarchy). Found that knowledge increased with development, and low levels of meaning were mastered before high levels, and more rapidly. Understanding in audio-taped stories was more difficult than in video-taped…

Four experiments involving 101 first and third graders investigated developmental changes in children's knowledge about the types of strategies that are appropriate for achieving goals of comprehension or memorization. Only third graders distinguished between comprehension and memory by consistently selecting the appropriate strategy. (SLD)

This study compared factors contributing to Quick Incidental Learning of new vocabulary by 50 5-year olds with specific language impairment (SLI) and 2 comparison groups. Although SLI children exhibited a robust representational mapping ability, performance was modulated by a minimum input constraint and apparent problems with storage into…

Reports on a development in interactive Japanese at a new facility where lexicographical information can be viewed with full contextual information. This information is available for any word in the 65 texts incorporated in the course. This method of showing all the collocations of a word was implemented to help users monitor progress. (24…

Describes a study with undergraduate students that examined whether the appearance of graphics and other visuals in a television newscast would result in lower recall of audio content, whether such visuals would promote comprehension of each story as a whole, and whether subjects would prefer stories with visuals. (24 references) (LRW)

Decoding, working memory, and domain-specific prior knowledge were studied as predictors of comprehension for 48 university undergraduate students after rewriting notes, rereading notes, or rereading a text. Working memory was most important for comprehension of text-implicit information, whereas knowledge was relatively more important for…

This study examined characteristics of multiple-choice reading comprehension tasks suspected of influencing their difficulty, through administration of the California Achievement Tests to 158 deaf college students. Problem components evaluated included manifest content, psychologically salient features, and processing demands. Variation in item…