This study investigated a psycholinguistic model of reading comprehension which attempts to relate readers' conceptual backgrounds to their ability to process syntactic structures. Specifically, the questions addressed involved the interaction between cognitive organizers and active and passive voices of verbs. Subjects included 409 third graders,…

The relationship between writing skills development and cognitive development is the focus of numerous research studies and deserves significant consideration in curriculum planning. Writing development studies indicate that as children work through the various modes of discourse (argumentation, exposition, narration, and description), they…

Written syntactic complexity is considered in relation to the four modes of discourse (argumentation, exposition, narration, and description). In a study of 153 children at three ability ranges within each of three grade levels (three, four, and five), syntactic complexity was found to differ significantly across the modes. The range of syntactic…

Three experiments with small samples of elementary school students were conducted to: (1) investigate the impact of syntactic complexity on analytic assistance; (2) extend the research on analytic assistance to younger subjects; and (3) determine the relative importance of analytic assistance when compared to an example-only comparison group.…

Finds support for the concurrent validity of miscue analysis as a measure of the silent reading processes of elementary school students with respect to the dimensions of syntactic and semantic strength. (FL)

Semantically congruous and incongruous sentences that varied in their syntactic complexity served as the contextual material in a study investigating the use of contextual cues in ongoing word recognition. The dependent variable was the time necessary to name target words that were preceded by the various context conditions. Subjects were 24…

A study examined the linguistic strategies of strong and weak readers in grades three and six within the context of D. E. Rumelhart's interactive model of the reading process. A linguistic prediction task was set up to investigate students' use of orthographic constraints, syntactic redundancy, and syntactic and semantic knowledge. A program was…

This article reports a study in which fourth graders were tested on their recall of stories they had read. Thrity-two children, divided into two groups of 16 by reading ability, each read two passages and were scored for recall. The passages read were either the original versions of two stories, semantic rewrites (in which anaphoric elements,…

To determine whether reading and writing are as closely related as commonly supposed, a study estimated the amount of overlap that exists between several components of reading and writing knowledge. Data were obtained from 256 second graders and 251 fifth graders. Reading measures included tests of phonics (word knowledge), vocabulary (lexical…

Discussion of text segmenting and comprehension highlights a study of elementary students in Australia that tested two hypotheses, one concerning reading abilities and one concerning information processing skills involved in syntactic analysis. Tests that measured vocabulary, comprehension, and processing skills are described, results are…

As part of a larger study of the oral reading of elementary school students representing eight linguistic populations in the United States, a study was conducted to discover why readers make the same miscues at the same point in a text and to discover factors in the text that contribute to this phenomenon. Subjects were second, fourth, and sixth…

This paper contends that children's failure to demonstrate predictable gains in reading ability may be attributable to the failure of the teaching program to focus on strategies involving larger and larger chunking of the language accesses. Teaching programs in reading should be constructed to develop middle-level reading skills. Such programs…

A study investigated whether syntactic differences between oral and written discourse interfere with the comprehension of beginning readers. Subjects were 28 second grade and 28 fifth grade students who read, orally, versions of stories identical in nature except for the structure of their syntactic patterns. One version contained structures more…

Advancing the thesis that a student develops a schema for reading in the same manner as schemata for other classes of things, events, and situations are developed, this paper contends that knowledge of "what reading is" should have a potent influence on how and when a person utilizes reading skills and strategies to extract information…

Examined syntactic development in acquisition of Swedish as a first language in normal (L1) and specifically language-impaired (SLI) children, and acquisition of Swedish as a second language (L2). Similarity between SLI learners and L2 learners is evidence against the hypothesis that there is a fundamental L1-L2 difference. Some data are appended.…