While listening comprehension is perhaps the most ignored area of the language arts, a review of the literature suggests that it is deserving of more classroom instructional time. Involving the simultaneous orchestration of skills in phonology, syntax, semantics, and knowledge of text structure, listening comprehension seems to be controlled by…

A study investigated children's recall and representation for multiple episode stories differing in terms of goal structure. Subjects were 36 third and fifth grade students reading below grade level, and 48 students from the same grades who were identified as average readers. The students read or listened to stories containing embedded and…

It is suggested that a reader's idea structure will affect processing of incoming information. Two aspects of the idea structure are further developed--the truth value aspect and the analytic level aspect. The idea structure can be characterized by ideas consisting of propositions which are considered to be more or less true or false (beliefs), or…

The theme of this report is that recent theory and research related to the cognitive domain of children's comprehension of stories have implications for the social domain of children's understanding of interpersonal interaction, since there are important overlaps between the abilities necessary to comprehend stories about social events and those…

This document reports the findings of a study of children's comprehension of stories containing inconsistent information. The subjects were 84 children in kindergarten and the second, fourth and sixth grades. Twelve subjects from each grade listened to two stories and twelve other subjects from grades 2, 4, and 6 read two stories. Each subject was…

The literature on individual differences in cognitive processes that operate at the text level is reviewed. Poor readers display comprehension deficits independent of word-decoding skill, due to deficient syntactic abilities and to more general metacognitive strategies. The general conclusions from this review and from Part One (ED 150 706) are…

A technique is demonstrated whereby an implicit semantic feature can be related to a grammatical alternative (pronoun-antecedent assignment) and thereby made explicit. It is also demonstrated that pragmatic, syntactic and other semantic features interact in an orderly way with this implicit feature of causality in verbs. (RC)

Third grade children are found to produce more abstract answers when asked about longer reading passages than when questioned about single sentences. (WR)

Two experiments are reported to distinguish between the representation of sentences in immediate versus longer-term memory. It is indicated that the immediate representation is a verbatim image of the sentence but at delays there are both verbatim images and propositional representations. (Author/RM)

Noting that--although explicit attention to the unconscious has been rare in argument theories--the notion is unavoidable in any full theory, this paper argues that the unconscious plays a central role in argumentation. After briefly discussing the characteristics of the unconscious, the first section of the paper presents an analysis of…

A study was conducted to investigate the relationship between understanding the setting and understanding the causal chain of a science fiction story. The 72 subjects, ranging in age from 16 to 54 and in educational level from high school seniors to those holding the doctoral degree, were divided into two groups that were labeled as sophisticated…

Reading is defined operationally as the cognitive process of perceiving and ordering our environment. As such it is a psychomotor process involving the reorganization of experiences evoked by some stimulus. Thus defined, reading is equated with perception and has several primary functions, including concept building, which begins with perception…

Continues discussion of Ronald Carter's Rauding Theory. (AA)

A framework developed to describe effective vocabulary instruction suggests that teaching methods can be described by the types of information they provide and the types of processing they require. (FL)

Describes experiments on how readers understand a narrative. Results suggest that readers combine information about the characters, events, and places with information about their order of mention in order to assign referents and that this is part of the process of constructing a model that represents the narrative description. (SED)