Based on a corpus made up of written descriptions of comic strips done by elementary level children. Elements most frequently mentioned by the children are identified in order to relate referential content to sociocultural factors. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/AM)

Corrects errors in "A Developmental Study of Learning Disabilities and Memory" by Stephen J. Ceci (Volume 38, Number 2 1984), pages 352-371. (AS)

The current experiment compared the development of encoding preferences in learning disabled children and non-disabled children. Both learning disabled (LD) and non-learning disabled (non-LD) boys from grades 2 and 6 were given a false recognition task. To measure the relative dominance of attributes encoded by the two groups at the two ages,…

Three experiments were conducted to determine how children assign meaning to a multiple-meaning word in a sentence context. Fourth-grade children were given sentences in which a key word carried a meaning other than its "primary," or most familiar, meaning. Two types of multiple choice questions could then follow: in the first type, the secondary,…

A group of 73 normal children (ages 8 to 10) was compared to 49 age-matched developmentally dyslexic children of average intelligence on the California Verbal Learning Test for Children (CVLT-C), to determine if reading disability was associated with impaired verbal memory. Dyslexics differed significantly from controls on 9 of the 12 CVLT-C…

The study involving 60 learning disabled (LD) children (7-10 years old) was designed to determine if LD children go beyond the given information when trying to understand and remember sentences, i.e., do they spontaneously construct inferential relationships like adults and other children, or do they attend to and rehearse individual sentences of…

The semantic memory search process was examined in second graders (N=30) under an induced imagery and a control condition. (MP)

This study investigated taxonomic clustering and use of frequency associations as features in the semantic memory of children (n=30 in grades two and six) with learning disabilities (LD). Results suggested that, when individual child-generated word lists (i.e., meaningful) are used, children with LD may not be impaired in their ability to utilize…

Previous research has shown that adults tend to narrow the meanings of words encountered in context, a process that has been termed instantiation. In the present study, 60 first and fourth graders selected pictures which best represented the meanings of sentences read to them. The sets of pictures included three examples of a target word in each…

After presenting a brief description of the principles of a story grammar, some experimental results are summarized to illustrate the power of story schemata in controlling recall. Specially constructed versions of four stories were used with second, fourth, and sixth graders and in a second experiment with adults. One version of each story was…

While semantic development has been alleged to proceed slowly, reading instruction begins early in the child's school career. Yet, little research has been addressed toward understanding how beginning readers extract meaning from the printed word. This paper reports two experiments that measured latencies in a picture-word interference task to…

Provides direct evidence of developmental differences in the processing of item-specific information, discussing how these differences affect recognition as well as recall performance in second graders, fifth graders, and college adults. Results suggest that retention varies as a result of the degree to which children differ from adults in…

In this study 60 first and fourth graders selected pictures that best represented the meanings of sentences read to them. Results indicated that children were instantiating the target words with specific concepts rather than bringing to mind abstract, undifferentiated meanings. (HOD)

Contrasts two theories about the use of semantic context information and reports data that support the theory that readers can use certain semantic strategies in dealing with context. (AEA)