Investigates age differences in children's processes of simultaneously comprehending the auditory and visual content of a televised story. Reports a developmental increase in utilizing semantic content of both auditory and visual content to form a unified representation of narrated events. (MM)

Fourteen children (ages 72-134 months) with specific language impairment (SLI) and 13 with normal language completed a nonsense word repetition task and a sentence comprehension task. Results suggest that SLI children have diminished phonological working memory capacity and that this capacity deficit compromises their sentence comprehension…

A series of 4 experiments involving 96 infants aged 6 to 17.5 months examined their capacities to detect repeated target words in fluent speech. Taken together, study results indicate that some ability to detect words in fluent speech contexts is present by 7.5 months of age. (SLD)

Advances two processes describing the relationship between message behaviors and narrative comprehension that differ in the likelihood that specific interpretations will be drawn given the presence of message cues. Finds that, in general, cues biased young children toward drawing a particular representation but that fifth graders delayed choosing…

Discusses the impact of the cognitive revolution in psychology on reading research. Cognitive perspectives of reading have revealed complex processes ranging from simple peripheral visual processing in letter recognition to high order processes in text comprehension. It is also argued that a full account of reading skill should include…

Considers how a person unaware of the text and choosing not to make meaning from it obtains little comprehension. Examines a motivational-cognitive model of reading that contributes to text comprehension. Notes that the motivational process is divided into five parts: (1) Task Mastery Goals; (2) Intrinsic Motivation; (3) Self-Efficacy; (4)…

Presents six experiments that investigate the hypothesis that text comprehension problems in young children arise from phonological processing difficulties for children in the presence of age-appropriate word reading skills. Supports previous work which indicates that poor comprehenders' problems arise from higher-level processing difficulties.…

Reports the results of a study of 45 Ph.D. history students who were asked questions about cognitive activity related to information events based on a grounded theory approach. Topics include knowledge acquisition; information process; a situation model theory of reading comprehension; elaborative inferencing; and domain experts versus domain…

College students (n=24) read passages marked for think-aloud (TA) procedure, not marked for TA, and control (no TA). The marked procedure elicited more veridical protocols, and students who scored high on the comprehension test were more likely to have made many TA comments reflecting a knowledge-transforming approach to the text. (SLD)

Investigates conscious understanding during narrative comprehension as revealed through use of think-aloud methodology. Presents an analytical model of conscious understanding. Identifies three working memory operations in the protocols--operations which are functionally necessary to inferences in the protocols. Discusses data and current models…

Presents a fresh way for teaching reading comprehension skills to learners of a language. Gives theoretical background, illustrates the basic steps used in the model for teaching reading comprehension, and discusses the advantages and features of this new model for teaching reading comprehension. (Author/VWL)

The authors investigated the effects of domain knowledge on online reading among younger and older adults. Individuals were randomly assigned to either a domain-relevant (i.e., high-knowledge) or domain-irrelevant (i.e., low-knowledge) training condition. Two days later, participants read target passages on a computer that drew on information…

Rereading can improve the accuracy of people's predictions of future test performance for text material. This research investigated this rereading effect by evaluating 2 predictions from the levels-of-disruption hypothesis: (a) The rereading effect will occur when the criterion test measures comprehension of the text, and (b) the rereading effect…

It has been suggested that predictive and bridging inferences are generated at different levels of text representation: predictive inferences at a reader's situation model and bridging inferences at a reader's propositional textbase (Fincher-Kiefer, 1993, 1996; McDaniel, Schmalhofer, & Keefe, 2001; Schmalhofer, McDaniel, & Keefe, 2002). Recently,…

Research on how the brain implements reading has produced results of remarkable consistency, especially on the functional anatomy of single word reading. We examine the general features of this emerging knowledge and draw attention to the extent to which it converges with results from other methods of reading science in several areas: reading…