Effects of mobilizing prior knowledge on information processing were studied with 3 groups of 12 adult subjects each. The assumption that activating different kinds of prior knowledge would induce different information processing activities during subsequent text processing (inferencing or elaborating) was tested using passages about fishing…

To characterize basic processes of reading comprehension, this report focuses on how the reader's schemata, or knowledge already stored in memory, function in the process of interpreting new information and allowing it to enter and become a part of the knowledge store. The paper first traces the historical antecedents of schema theory, then…

Presents evidence that young children's comprehension of the locatives "in", "on", and "under" is, at least in part, contextually determined. Children were given tasks with verbal instructions which were either contextually congruent or incongruent. Results are interpreted in terms of the non-linguistic as well as linguistic strategies apparently…

A theory of comprehension in verification tasks is developed from a general conception of language comprehension. Models are developed for a task involving transfer verbs "borrow" and "loan" and the possession verb "have." Models and theoretical framework are superior in some respects to constituent comparison and conversion models. (CHK)

Research is reported in which a memory-for-marked-semantic-features theory was juxtaposed to a memory-for-meaning theory. The results were interpreted as supporting a global memory-for-meaning theory. (Author/RM)

A set of experiments are reported in which it was found that most subjects were better at identifying both meaning and wording changes in concrete sentences and subjects took significantly longer to encode and decode the abstract sentences. Implications of these findings are discussed. (Author/RM)

Four experiments investigated the phenomenon of letter migration, the tendency of readers to assign letters from one word to another appearing in close proximity. The experiments, which involved college undergraduate students, revealed several properties of letter migration, including the following: (1) migrations are more frequent when the words…

Forty-seven reading disabled children whose major reading problem was comprehension participated in a study to examine the effects of interventions designed to structure information in encoding and recall through the use of categorization strategy. Short term treatment consisted of four tutorials over a 2-week period. Long term treatment 1…

Semantic priming is the process by which a subject performing a lexical decision task is prepared for a target word through the presentation of a semantically related word. Repetition of a given word at specific intervals is one form of priming that has been shown to reduce subject reaction time in word recognition tasks. A study was conducted to…

The relationship was explored between the ability to understand nonverbal metaphoric similarity and the ability to produce verbal metaphors to talk about that similarity. Subjects, 45 college students, were shown filmed scenes that depicted both metaphoric and literal similarity. Half of the scenes were of stationary objects and half of moving…

Two experiments were conducted to test three hypotheses related to comprehension. The hypotheses were: that actions are harder to modify than states; that implications or inferences from modified concepts would also change in memory; and that propagation of modifications would be less likely to states than to actions. The first experiment tested…

Two studies investigated whether variations in the importance of inferences and the salience of premises within a text would affect the probability that the inference would be made. Six stories of about 500 words were used, with eight variations of each story. The target inference, and its plausibility, was constant across all versions. Inference…

Two experiments examine the extent to which the representation of a sentence depends upon the overall nature of a subject's task, in this case, memorization of a sentence and providing a continuation for a sentence. (AM)

Presents evidence in support of the ordered search model of word meaning computation in sentence contexts. This model hypothesizes that access to multiple meanings occurs in a fixed order regardless of context. (AM)

Presents two experiments which measured latencies in a picture-word interference task to assess semantic processing. Results suggest that picture-word interference is partly semantically based and that children and adults experience an equivalent amount of semantic interference. (Author/SDH)