The first of three articles on the ways in which people formulate their observations, this paper considers the basic assumptions of both syntactic and paradigmatic models of cognition and their applications in natural (i.e., human) and artificial (i.e., computer) information processing. The analysis begins with background information on the nature…

Most studies of eye movement behavior during reading have dealt with the processes involved with local aspects of text, such as visual or graphic characteristics or individual word features. To determine if a global level of processing (pertaining to the whole text or to large sections of it) would affect eye movement patterns differently, a study…

A study investigated the effects of verbalizing comprehension strategies on reading achievement, self-efficacy, and ability attributions of 26 children in grades four and five. The subjects, who had reading comprehension deficiencies, received instruction practice and opportunities. Within each grade, half of the subjects verbalized strategies…

An analysis of the skills involved in listening comprehension and techniques for developing them in students looks first at elements of the general process of interpretation, showing the essential importance of the interpretative functions as contrasted with simple comprehension of sounds and decoding of meaning. The first section looks at…

A study investigated reconstructive recall for linguistic style. It was hypothesized that (1) features of linguistic style would be more difficult to recall than underlying content, (2) reconstructive errors would include stylistic forms recalled as standard forms when subjects lacked productive control of a particular feature of a style, and (3)…

As a result of a program of research about cognitive processes involved in learning to read and write among 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year old-children, this book attempts to get teacher-researchers to think through the implications of recent insights into literacy and literacy learning. The first section examines instructional assumptions; proposes a new…

This paper discusses the relationship between the mediation of task performance by some structure that is not inherent in the task domain itself and the phenomenon of automatization, in which skilled performance becomes effortless or phenomenologically "automatic" after extensive practice. The use of a common simple explicit mediating…

Education has often created and widened the distinctions between reading and writing rather than focusing on their relationship. More recently, however, research has advanced a view that recognizes reading and writing to be instances of communication between people. Research also suggests that five kinds of knowledge (informational, structural,…

Listening is a crucial element in the communication process. To date, however, research efforts have been unsuccessful in identifying the proper role that listening should play in the building of communication theory. To be a legitimate part of the communication process, listening must be placed in a conceptual framework similar to those found in…

There are many children, termed "perseverative," whose reading comprehension problems stem from the fact that they form hypotheses about the meaning of a text at the onset of reading, then fail to evaluate or modify those hypotheses on the basis of subsequent text findings. A study was undertaken to identify such readers and to explore…

Explanations for differences in reading proficiency should be constructed around an atlas of reading-related individual differences in cognition. Such an atlas should include well-documented "bottom-up", text-driven reading strategies and less thoroughly investigated "top-down", schema-driven reading strategies. Research…

Controlling the rate of oral delivery in the second language classroom has been demonstrated as beneficial to the learner, whose information-processing capacity is an important factor in listening comprehension. Rate of information delivery can be controlled by limiting the actual rate of words per unit of time, or by maintaining content…

Three studies tested the theory that long term memory consists of a semantically organized network of concept nodes interconnected by leveled associations or relations, and that when a stimulus is processed, the corresponding concept node is assumed to be temporarily activated and this activation spreads to nearby semantically related nodes. In…

In order to determine the effect of certain types of pictures on reading comprehension in beginning French, a study was conducted in which six types of pictorial contexts were used as advanced organizers for a test passage. One group of university students was given a text in French, a second group the same text in English, and a third group a set…

Four problems in children's paired-associate memory were addressed: (1) reappraisal of the presumed developmental trend in presentation mode effect during grade-school years, (2) identification of the locus of this developmental effect, (3) evaluation of the influence of combined presentation (verbal plus pictorial) relative to pictorial…