Prompted by current theories in reading suggesting that variation in word knowledge affects the processing of not only individual words but also clauses and sentences, this report explores some different ways in which children's comprehension processes may be affected by variation in word knowledge. The report first examines whether the effects of…

When readers encounter the dissonance of conflicting ideas and are motivated by the psychological discomfort to resolve the dissonance, the effort to alleviate this discomfort may well result in the activation of those cognitive processes termed critical reading and thinking. With this in mind, one approach to teaching critical reading treats…

To explore the role of one specific revision strategy--reading and rereading pieces of text--in the composing process, case studies were made of two college freshman writers: Jim, who was highly apprehensive about the process of composing, and David, who was not at all apprehensive about writing. Specifically, videotapes of the students' composing…

An organizational framework consisting of the following four components is useful in exploring questions about improving textbooks: learner characteristics, learning activities, the critical task (for measuring student performance), and the nature of the materials. In considering learning characteristics and the materials, it is important to…

This paper advocates an integrated study of English rather than the traditional approach of studying language, literature, and composition. Its focus is not on designing an integrated curriculum, but on using this approach to develop reasoning skills for secondary students. One integrated curriculum program for the development of reasoning skills…

A 9-month study of a 1-year-old child's acquisition of the pronunciation of "camera" is presented. The data show that while the child can articulate and perceive all the phonological segments of the adult form, she uses an idiosyncratic child-based form when she spontaneously draws from her lexicon to produce an utterance, systematically modifying…

Within the framework of a general model of communication, a model of language communication has been developed and applied to the perception of cohesion. To measure students' perception of textual cohesion, a pilot study in the United Kingdom built "noise" into texts by deleting parts of each texts. Subjects, 59 nonremedial students whose first…

Punctuation serves as a system of visual markers that contradict previously generated false grammatical expectations. Word order conditions define the redundant or critical aspect of punctuation cues to visual display. Parsing (grouping) sentences into meaningful phrases and clauses aids language comprehension, and children who have reading…

A study investigated the process of information extraction in reading in order to determine whether language constraints in texts reduced the amount of visual detail noticed by the reader during the reading of specific words. A detailed examination was made of 20 college students' eye movement patterns as they read a group of selected passages.…

Many linguists have maintained that the pronouns "he,""his," and "him" and the noun "man," when used in the generic sense, legitimately refer to both males and females and effectively cue readers to think of both. Others have argued, however, that the generic terms cause readers to "filter out" or…

The middle childhood years are a period of refinement of the semantics and syntax acquired in the early years, of substantial metalinguistic development, and of subtle changes in actual processing strategies. In a study undertaken to determine how these three factors interact, children aged 6 to 11 were asked to produce and recognize paraphrases.…

A number of issues relating to metaphor are discussed in this report. Offering an account of what makes metaphors "metaphorical" (a way of understanding what metaphors are), the report also discusses some of the psychological processes associated with the comprehension of metaphor (how the understanding of metaphors might come about).…

Considerable attention has been devoted in recent years to theories of text comprehension and recall that stress the importance of preexisting knowledge structures or schemata. While the valuable contribution such research has made to the understanding of the reading process and the various disabilities that often attend its acquisition must be…

Reports on research showing that when an event, or a problem, is repeated, the processing of that event is not necessarily repeated. Instead, sometimes the solution is remembered, and this is shown to influence subsequent retention, as well as such tasks as word perception. (AM)

Three elements of the reading process--presence, mediation, and ego response--help students discover their own ontological, intellectual, and psychological role in bringing forth literature's meanings. Students experience a dramatic shift in their ability to make sense of literature as they become increasingly conscious of these three elements.…