This chapter examines the lexical availability of students of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) and observes how their semantic networks change as their proficiency in Spanish increases. The analysis focuses on 150 students with different levels of proficiency and the two centres of interest: "acciones y actividades habituales"…

The benefits of retrieval practice (practice testing) are pervasive across various materials, learning conditions, and criterial tasks, and consequently researchers and educators have enthusiastically recommended retrieval practice for educational applications. Less research has been devoted to examining the effect of combining retrieval practice…

Purpose: Complex features of science texts present idiosyncratic challenges for middle grade readers, especially in a post-Common Core educational world where students' learning is dependent on understanding informational text. The primary aim of this study was to explore how middle school readers process science texts and whether such…

Sleep fosters the generation of explicit knowledge. Whether sleep also benefits implicit intuitive decisions about underlying patterns is unclear. We examined sleep's role in explicit and intuitive semantic coherence judgments. Participants encoded sets of three words and after a sleep or wake period were required to judge the potential…

In understanding comprehension as the active processing of reading material, and in assuming that certain key content is stored in the memory, then mnemonic cues could be one important means of recalling this stored information. Since associative words apparently have high mnemonic cue value, they have been the subject of numerous investigations.…

The purpose of the experiment was to test the prediction that non-specific facilitated learning of a second prose passage will occur in the situation where an initial passage read by the subjects contained concrete referents designed to increase the comprehension of a difficult to understand second passage. Two-hundred and forty subjects…

Twenty college students, ten each in the experimental and control groups, were the subjects of an experiment designed to demonstrate that integration of verb meanings occurs in connected discourse. Six paragraph-length stories, each of which included one or two critical sentences containing a general verb, were presented orally to the subjects.…

The focus of this experiment was on the effects of associative strength on retention of connected discourse, in terms of both single words and strings of words. Also of interest was the short- and long-term retention of two types of information, verbatim and substance. Verbatim information covered words and word sequences identical to those in the…

Describes two subject-paced reading experiments in which word-reading times were collected using the moving-window method. Finds that reading times of content words increase more steeply than reading times for function words. Discusses results in terms of buffer models of reading, the processing of different lexical classes, and hypotheses which…

Sentences are understood by outlining associative relations between the concepts representing the meanings of the words. When the words are received the activation spreads from their conceptual counterparts to the other concepts in memory, so that some implicit thoughts are often added to the mental representation of a sentence. As sentences are…