Forty-seven reading disabled children whose major reading problem was comprehension participated in a study to examine the effects of interventions designed to structure information in encoding and recall through the use of categorization strategy. Short term treatment consisted of four tutorials over a 2-week period. Long term treatment 1…

Semantic priming is the process by which a subject performing a lexical decision task is prepared for a target word through the presentation of a semantically related word. Repetition of a given word at specific intervals is one form of priming that has been shown to reduce subject reaction time in word recognition tasks. A study was conducted to…

This paper provides a general description of schema-theoretic models of language comprehension and examines some extensions of such models to the study of reading. The goal of schema theory is to specify the interface between the reader and the text: to specify how the reader's knowledge interacts with and shapes the information on the page and to…

Two studies investigated whether variations in the importance of inferences and the salience of premises within a text would affect the probability that the inference would be made. Six stories of about 500 words were used, with eight variations of each story. The target inference, and its plausibility, was constant across all versions. Inference…

The four main components of the reading process are as follows: (1) physiological, the apprehension of printed symbols by the eyes and the engagement of the brain and the nervous system; (2) phonological, hearing the words in the mind's ear; (3) understanding, requiring semantic knowledge, syntactic knowledge, and related prior experience on the…

Presents evidence in support of the ordered search model of word meaning computation in sentence contexts. This model hypothesizes that access to multiple meanings occurs in a fixed order regardless of context. (AM)

Presents two experiments which measured latencies in a picture-word interference task to assess semantic processing. Results suggest that picture-word interference is partly semantically based and that children and adults experience an equivalent amount of semantic interference. (Author/SDH)

A study was undertaken to delineate and assess the comprehension monitoring activities adults employed when following directions to assemble a model. The study also examined the effects of mode of presentation on such activities. Twenty-six college students were assigned to one of three groups and given a model to assemble. One group received…

Noting that current theories of comprehension are based on the assumption that cognitive patterns (schemata) are structural constructs and that credit for the structural assumption is generally given to F. C. Bartlett, this paper suggests that problems concerning the phenomenal nature of the patterning aspect of cognition may be more readily…

This report summarizes computational investigations of language comprehension based on Marvin Minsky's theory of frames, a recent advance in artifical intelligence theories about the representation of knowledge. The investigations discussed explored frame theory as a basis for text comprehension by implementing models of the theory and developing…

This paper is intended to serve as an introduction to text analysis as a research tool and vehicle for improving instruction. In terms of perspective, two major theses are maintained throughout the paper: text analysis should be used within the context of understanding that a multiplicity of variables can influence reader/text interactions, and…

Two studies assessed third, fifth, and seventh grade children's sensitivity to relative importance in prose. Children rated importance similarly to adults when assigned perspectives from which to read. The children's ratings were not necessarily idiosyncratic: they agreed more with each other than with adults rating the same material.…

Reading as thinking, the key to reading maturity, flexibility, and efficiency, is dependent upon the reader's purposes and his repertory of reading skills. Instruction should begin with the teacher's evaluation of the reader's functioning skill level, his psychological characteristics, and the nature and quality of his stored information. Skillful…

The organizational thinking structure presented here aims to help teachers and children to develop and use thinking skills during reading. Three levels of reading are defined: reading the lines, reading between the lines, and reading beyond the lines. (Author/DS)

Reading comprehension is an active inferential process. Three experiments are described in which the possibility was examined that highly probable inferences are drawn, even when they are unnecessary for comprehension. (Author/RM)