A study investigated the effects of induced mental imagery upon the comprehension of oral versus written discourse for above and below average readers. A secondary purpose of the study was to determine, through a follow-up interview, the students' ability to induce mental imagery. Sixty-three sixth grade students with above or below average…

The "individual forming meaning with a text" is a private and fundamental semiotic process involving relationships among text, individual, and meaning. Prior to an individual's use of language for aesthetic purposes lies the presupposition of the aesthetic language act--that the individual approaches the text expecting to work and be rewarded.…

Presents a reply to and an analysis of a study which examined the use of logograph research to determine children's cognitive integration ability. The study in question had been based on the present author's previous research. (BD)

Compares the effects of audio and audiovisual presentation on young children's cognitive processing while explicitly controlling the amount and complexity of information. (HOD)

Discusses issues raised during the course of a research project conducted to determine the place of comprehension activities in the teaching of English, including the question of whether the development of comprehension activities has any place in the teaching of English at the 12-grade level. (DF)

Provides a literature review of research done in recent years to identify comprehension processes within the reader. (TJ)

The main objective in the present study is to examine the effect of gender on primary school students' construction of elaborative backward inferences during text processing. A total of 333 children, aged 10-11 years (n = 158 girls and 175 boys) participated in the study. Each participant completed a backward inference test. The results indicate…

This paper explores how the interaction between cognitive style, gender, and type of task predicts task outcome, particularly when presentation speed is varied. A sample of 91 11-year-old pupils completed the Cognitive Style Analysis. Pupils were assigned to one of two groups balanced for gender and cognitive style. Group 1 listened to a recording…

Spatial reasoning or locating objects in a spatial space has long been an important area of research in cognitive science because analyzing space categorically and finding objects is a fundamental act of mental perception and cognition. Premise integration in tasks of spatial reasoning has recently received considerable research attention. This is…

There is mounting evidence that language comprehension involves the activation of mental imagery of the content of utterances (Barsalou, 1999; Bergen, Chang, & Narayan, 2004; Bergen, Narayan, & Feldman, 2003; Narayan, Bergen, & Weinberg, 2004; Richardson, Spivey, McRae, & Barsalou, 2003; Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001; Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002).…

In this study, participants performed a sentence-picture verification task in which they read sentences about an agent viewing an object (e.g., moose) through a differentially occlusive medium (e.g., clean vs. fogged goggles), and then verified whether a subsequently pictured object was mentioned in the previous sentence. Picture verification…

Intended to illuminate current understanding of how the reader's cognition and language and the text's structure affect the processing of prose, this volume contains articles written by educators, linguists, psychologists, and artificial intelligence experts on issues of comprehension research. The first part of the book examines reading…

More than 100 college students enrolled in a reading and study skills course participated in a study designed to show the effects of retrieval speed on adult reading comprehension. A microcomputer version of the Posner task was used to measure memory retrieval speed, and reading and listening comprehension were measured from McCall-Crabbs…

According to S. K. Langer, people create meaning through presentational and discursive symbolism. Presentational symbolism, Langer suggests, is an abstracted sense of experienced life, while discursive symbolism is a series of subordinating or coordinating positions that set in motion the relation of ideas and permits the discussion of causation.…