Investigates the relationship between children's cognitive and affective processes in 30 four and five year olds who were interviewed individually to probe affective understanding, administered a series of Piagetian tasks, and given the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Performance on affective and cognitive tasks correlated significantly.…

To evaluate individual differences in children's propensity to demonstrate cognitive synthesis, six-year-olds were asked to demonstrate the meaning of various sentences constructed of logographs, which were arranged in either a meaningful or scrambled order. Overall, synthesizers had a larger attentional reserve, or M-capacity, than…

Discusses the systematic relationship between the language patterns of a text and the context of situation that enables a reader to predict from one to the other. (FL)

Reading rates and comprehension measures that probed recognition of various levels of text structure were collected for passages read orally and silently by 16 college students. Results showed that memory traces of text microstructure created in oral reading were accessed faster during memory-based comprehension tasks than traces established by…

Describes how teachers can apply metacomponents to their instructional decision making to help them develop and execute comprehension training lessons. (FL)

Examines two texts showing that the relational propositions (frequently implicit) that arise out of a combination of independent clauses involve every clause and that they occur in a pattern of propositions that connects all of the clauses together. Shows how relational propositions are essential to the functioning of the text. (HTH)

Fifteen exercises are presented that are intended to increase reading comprehension in seventh and eighth graders via emphasis on word recognition, language comprehension (syntax and semantics), and reasoning skills (including inference, analogies, relationships, and direction following). (CL)

Argues that making inferences is an integral part of reading comprehension. Presents classroom strategies based on current research that encourage inference skill development. (FL)

Examines comprehension strategies experienced readers use to deal with very difficult text. (HOD)

An inductive concept-identification model of expository text processing, consonant with current theories of macrostructure development, is proposed as part of a reading comprehension instruction model. An evaluation study with fourth and sixth graders is described. Results are interpreted as supporting the model. (Author/BS)

Describes a project in which children were given in-depth experiences with a range of quality stories and then were interviewed using a series of open-ended questions to obtain their responses. The project was intended to gain insight into the process by which children make sense and meaning from stories. (HTH)

Presents results from a study that used an intensive design approach to investigate cognitive aspects of fluent reading. Cites data from the study to illustrate the advantages of the methodology for monitoring intrasubject variability in text processing. (FL)

Reviews the research on children's understanding of the intent of advertising, the persuasive impact of television commercials, and children's cognitive defenses and resistance to such persuasion. Concludes that any model which tries to account for advertising's influence on children must incorporate affective as well as cognitive components. (PD)

Argues that the mystery surrounding comprehension development can be dispelled by an understanding of schema theory and linguistic theory and especially by an understanding of W. Kintsch's model of comprehension, which draws from those bodies of theory. Describes teaching methods based upon Kintsch's model. (FL)

The performance of two groups of elementary school children on a modified cloze test under two different conditions demonstrated that lexical information was retained in memory, thus supporting the claim that lexical information persists in memory representations of meaning. Includes extensive tables of data. (FL)