Reviews experiments designed to determine whether pictures have an effect upon the derivation of meaning from the text printed in children's reading materials and notes ways that pictures support and possibly interfere with meaning. (MKM)

Explores whether training in mental imagery can improve text comprehension in good and poor nine-year-old comprehenders. Finds that a three-session program of training in imagery benefited the poor, but not the good, comprehenders. Discusses results in relation to possible causes of children's comprehension difficulties. (MG)

Investigates context effects for words with more than one meaning. Finds that younger children (third graders) were more sensitive to the sentence context in which an ambiguous word appears, whereas the processing of older children (sixth graders) was determined more by the relative frequencies of the word meanings. (RS)

Investigates effects of illustrations on 11-year-olds' comprehension of abstract and concrete passages. Reveals no significant effects due to the illustrations, although ability effects were found for literal, inferential, and total comprehension. (DF)

Compares the performance of good and poor readers on information processing tasks. (FL)

Details a study of the reading development of seven- and nine-year-old deaf children. Concludes that the children progressed satisfactorily in the early stages of reading but had not attained the ability to extract meaning from sentences by age nine. (FL)

Examines students for the effects of grade level and recall task type on children's memory for explicit, implicit, and metaphorical information following reading. Finds that fifth graders fare better than second graders and the cued condition exceeds free recall. Finds that second graders engage in metaphorical reasoning when the task is…

Investigates the relationship between the reading comprehension and information processing strategies of fluent oral readers of Oriya (a language spoken in India) orthography. Notes that Oriya has some significant differences from English orthography. Finds that good comprehenders were relatively more intelligent that the poor comprehenders and…

Examines the cognitive-linguistic factors underlying literacy development in monolingual children and children learning English as an additional language (EAL) over a three-year period. Reveals similarities between the two groups of children in the study on reading accuracy, but children learning EAL had lower levels of vocabulary and…

Concludes that elementary school children taught with a technique involving nonverbal restructuring made significant reading gains over those taught with a question-answer method. (FL)

Examines the "levels effect" (the theory that more important text elements are more likely to be remembered than less important elements) in children and adults when reading expository text. Finds differences between adults and children in the extent to which they engaged in the type of processing that resulted in levels effects. (MG)

Investigates the development of children's metacognitive knowledge about reading, its relationship to reading performance, and the influence of using two different interviewing techniques for eliciting information about reading. (FL)

Describes a study of third- and sixth-grade students indicating no differences in comprehension between story reading on a page and on a computer screen, and that students were more interested in the story while reading from the screen, but that the story was more difficult in this condition. (HTH)

Reports on two experiments that explore the comprehension difficulties of children with normal word recognition ability. Concludes that skilled readers engage in more constructive processing and that comprehension difficulties are not the result of a defective working memory. (SRT)