To examine metacomprehension during comprehension, undergraduates (n = 133) were asked to provide descriptions of how they determined the meaning of four rare words presented in short passages. Content analysis of these written descriptions revealed task-specific metacomprehension reflecting lexical, textbase, and situation model processes.…

The visual attention (VA) span is defined as the amount of distinct visual elements which can be processed in parallel in a multi-element array. Both recent empirical data and theoretical accounts suggest that a VA span deficit might contribute to developmental dyslexia, independently of a phonological disorder. In this study, this hypothesis was…

The study involving 82 hearing and 78 hearing impaired undergraduates was undertaken to test the hypothesis that hearing impaired Ss would cluster prepositions into different sentence groups when operating from scrambled story presentations than would hearing Ss. It was also hypothesized that hearing impaired Ss would show different cluster…

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…

This paper is concerned with the process of human reading as a high-level perceptual task. Drawing on insights from artificial-intelligence research--specifically, research in natural language processing and continuous speech understanding--the paper attempts to present a fairly concrete picture of the kinds of hypothesis formation and inference…

Studies of 42 fifth-grade students and 36 college undergraduates were conducted to test changes in verbalizations of schemata over time and in response to informational jolts. In both experiments, subjects were asked to write everything they could think of about dinosaurs and then to put those ideas in order of importance. Two weeks later, the…

The degree to which printed text and graphics complement each other to facilitate reading comprehension was studied with the following four research tools: a system for analyzing text and graphics to reveal aspects of their form and content; procedures to permit analysis of both verbal and nonverbal recall measures of comprehension, allowing…

Attempts have been made to develop a model of the process of reading comprehension as a whole that would indicate under what conditions and for what reasons a long sentence might be more effective than several short ones, when repetition is helpful and when distracting, when content is better left implicit in a text, and how overexplicitness might…

This paper analyzes the reading task, using a conceptual analysis of reading developed by the linguistic philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Eschewing theory and explanation while leading his reader through a series of cases and experiences, Wittgenstein causes the reader-experiencer-viewer to "see" that reading is a word which stands for…

Describes how to construct behavioral objectives based upon psycholinguistic reading processes. (MKM)

Examines Frank Smith's analysis of the reading process with respect to comprehension, specifically, his assertion that during the reading process, comprehension of meaning precedes word identification. Discusses the implications of Smith's analysis for the teaching of reading. (JM)

Finds no relationship between young children's ability to attend to text and to nominate a greater number of purposes for learning to read. (FL)

Explores the similar and different ways that reading and writing influence consciousness. Summarizes the relationship between reading and writing as meditation--a way of modifying inner speech or composing in the mind. (HTH)

Outlines seven basic concepts regarding teachers' understanding of the comprehension process and proposes several instructional strategies based on the concepts, each of which actively involves children in reading. (FL)