A fundamental assumption of many theories of conversation is that comprehension of a speaker's utterance involves recognition of the speaker's intention in producing that remark. However, the nature of intention recognition is not clear. One approach is to conceptualize a speaker's intention in terms of speech acts [Searle, J. (1969). "Speech…

The purpose of this study is to determine how behavioral symptoms of inattention predict rapid automatized naming (RAN) performance and reading skills in typically developing children. Participants included 104 third- and fourth-grade children from different elementary schools in mid-Michigan. RAN performance was assessed using the four Rapid…

Studies by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, 2009) indicate that the inability to comprehend text is one of the primary reasons students perform poorly in school Reading difficulties often persist into adulthood with 23% of U.S. adults only meeting basic reading proficiency levels (NCES, 2004). To address this problem, it is…

This study investigated the cognitive effort of 5th and 9th graders while writing a text. We manipulated genre (narrative text vs. argumentative text) and tested how level of handwriting automatisation contributes to cognitive effort and fluency in writing. The participants were 23 students from Grade 5 and 21 from Grade 9, who wrote two texts…

It is important for children to develop knowledge of words' meanings from a young age because vocabulary development has an impact on their reading comprehension and academic success as they get older. Some children come to school knowing far fewer words than others. Hart and Risley studied young children's vocabulary development and found that…

The authors examined how motivational and cognitive variables predict reading comprehension, and whether each predictor variable adds unique explanatory power when statistically controlling for the others. Fourth-grade students (N = 205) completed measures of reading comprehension in September and December of the same year, and measures of…

This study aims at arousing college students' metacognition in detecting lexical cohesion during online text construction as WordNet served as a lexical resource. A total of 83 students were requested to construct texts through sequences of actions identified as interaction chains in this study. Interaction chains are grouped and categorized as a…

To detect that a conversational turn is intended to be ironic is a difficult challenge in everyday language comprehension. Most authors suggested a theory of mind deficit is crucial for irony comprehension deficits in psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia; however, the underlying pathophysiology and neurobiology are unknown and recent research…

As the ongoing national indicator of what American students know and can do, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading regularly collects achievement information on representative samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Through The Nation's Report Card, the NAEP Reading Assessment reports how well students perform in…

Purpose: This article is a response to A. G. Kamhi's proposal of the narrow view of reading. Method: A descriptive approach is used to review research concerning the cognitive basis of reading comprehension. Educational implications for instruction and assessment are considered. The role of the speech-language pathologist (SLP) in intervention…

As the ongoing national indicator of what American students know and can do, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading regularly collects achievement information on representative samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Through "The Nation's Report Card," the NAEP Reading Assessment reports how well students…

Among his many accomplishments in educational psychology, Merlin C. Wittrock is perhaps best remembered for his enduring contributions to the science of learning. His vision of how learning works is best explicated in articles published in "Educational Psychologist" (Wittrock, 1974, 1978, 1989, 1991, 1992), beginning with his classic 1974 article,…

Students with learning disabilities (LD) often struggle with reading comprehension (Shaywitz, 2003), even after attaining basic decoding skills. Similar proportions of students with LD have also been found to differ from their typical peers in some aspect of social adjustment (Kavale & Forness, 1996). Yet there is very little known about the…

The cognitive load theory recommendations for enhancing the success of teaching are effective up to a certain boundary. The paper is dedicated to finding this boundary line in sentence length for 17-18-year-old students. The students filled in the blanks in 30 cloze tests. The cloze test results were correlated with the percentage of sentences…

Children with reading comprehension difficulties display impaired performance on semantic processing tasks. These impairments are assumed to reflect weaker knowledge about abstract semantic associations between words in poor comprehenders [Nation, K., & Snowling, M. (1999). Developmental differences in sensitivity to semantic relations among good…