A dynamic model of reading that represents the processes of gaining idiosyncratic integrated meaning from the silent reading of continuous textual discourse has been developed. It includes the roles of the affective interactions as well as the cognitive connections and integrations energized during the silent reading of a continuous text. The…

THIS STUDY INVESTIGATED THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHILDREN'S HUMOR RESPONSE AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT. BY USING CHILDREN OF DIFFERENT GRADE LEVELS AS SUBJECTS, IT WAS ASSUMED THAT THE STUDY WOULD INCLUDE SEVERAL LEVELS OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT. TWENTY-FIVE CARTOONS WERE SHOWN TO 64 TEST CHILDREN. THE TEST CHILDREN WERE CHOSEN FROM GRADES TWO,…

This report reviews experimental techniques that have been used to assess sentence comprehension by preschool children and describes a new technique, word monitoring, which permits an assessment of the momentary demands made upon sentence-processing mechanisms as a child listens to a sentence. (The time it takes the child to push a button in…

This study of children's memory was intended to: (1) extend a set of procedures used to study levels of processing in the memory of adults, and (2) study the development of the dynamic memory system unencumbered by developmentally influenced strategies in the areas of metamemory, encoding, organization and storage, and retrieval. Ninety-six…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of contextual knowledge on comprehension and retention of text material. The subjects were 144 high school students randomly assigned to experimental conditions. The subjects were provided with different types of information about the theme and context of various prose passages, and…

The purpose of this study was to determine if the Bransford and Franks linear effect is or is not a function of semantic integration. The subjects were 32 volunteers from two undergraduate psychology courses at the University of Georgia. Stimulus materials consisted of four meaningful (M) complex embedded English sentences and four meaningless…

This examination of the processes in reading comprehension is divided into seven categories. "Theoretical Foundations" reviews some of the research conducted by Bruner, Piaget, and Bloom in the areas of cognition or comprehension processes of young children. "Development of a Spiraling Reading Curriculum" examines a spiraling taxonomy of reading…

In this paper the author examines the "encoding-decoding" model of speaking and understanding English. He reviews in detail an objection to the model: that it was specifically designed with a view to incorporating linguistic theories, such as syntax, into it. As a result, what it more or or less accurately represents is the relation…

This report examines the process of learning large complex subject matters, by asking about the ways in which teachers and students communicate the necessary knowledge structures to each other and how a student comes to select an appropriate paradigm for solving a problem and revising inappropriate solutions. Protocols from several different…

To determine concept usage performance of the mentally handicapped when confronted with familiar items used in the concept usage tasks, 32 common concepts were presented to 25 educable mentally handicapped and 22 non-retarded subjects. From the responses to this number of referents task, a concept usage task was constructed which required choosing…

The question of how people learn and remember information from complex written materials is explored by means of Grime's semantic grammar of propositions and the author's analysis of the content structure of prose. This paper, presented at the 1973 Interdisciplinary Meeting on Structural Learning, first discusses such elements of the semantic…

Evidence has accumulated indicating that high arousal or activation facilitates long-term retention (LTR) but depresses short-term retention (STR) relative to low activation in list learning. The present study extended this research to the learning and retention of text by children. It specifically investigated the effects of questions inserted…

In order to determine what aspects of information from prose are available for recall after one presentation of a passage and what aspects are learned with additional presentations, two passages were divided into idea units. These units were placed in a logical hierarchical structure for each passage, and scores were assigned to the idea units on…

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that, when interpreted in context, general terms are typically encoded on the basis of an instantiation. The results indicated that a particular term naming the expected instantiation of a general term was a better cue for the recall of a sentence than the general term itself, even though the general…

A study is reported in which short-term memory capacity, estimated by a probe digit task, and memory for structured language, measured by a probe discourse task, were investigated in an experiment with third and fifth grade IQ-matched children representing two levels of reading comprehension skill. (Author/RM)