This study aims at arousing college students' metacognition in detecting lexical cohesion during online text construction as WordNet served as a lexical resource. A total of 83 students were requested to construct texts through sequences of actions identified as interaction chains in this study. Interaction chains are grouped and categorized as a…

The relationship between lower level code availability and top-down contextual processing in word recognition was investigated in two experiments. The major finding was that the increment in performance resulting from coherent organization relative to the random passage was equivalent in both normal and reversed orthographic forms. (Author/GK)

Two experiments examined subjects' ability to recognize or to recall sensible, interrelated sentences, with or without added bizarre sentences, either immediately or after two weeks. Results suggested that processing bizarre information can lead to more accurate recognition and recall of the sensible context. (Author/MH)

Four experiments examined the "distinctiveness of encoding" hypothesis with respect to recall of text materials. Specifically, they investigated: (1) recall of distinctively versus nondistinctively encoded material; (2) readers' interactions with the semantic base of the text; (3) encoding and recall of semantic content; and (4) the role…

Two experiments and two questionnaire studies investigated the processing of sluiced sentences among college student participants. Results show that, because the interpretation of a sluiced constituent takes place at the representational level of logical form (LF), implicit arguments are not made explicit at LF, but focus is important in the…

Points out that writing errors of journalism students can result from faulty thought patterns involving thinking in sentence fragments, personifying objects, using bureaucratic abstractions, and condensing complex ideas; examines ways of dealing with bureaucratic coding and compressed sentences. (Conclusion of a two-part article.) (GT)

Subjects completed sentences of the form NP1 aux V NP2 because (but) Pro...(e.g., John may scold Bill because he...) with a reason or motive for the action described. A basic perceptual strategy was hypothesized to underlie the comprehension of these sentences which have a potentially ambiguous pronoun in the subject position of the subordinate…

Two experiments examined the roles of semantic and surface information in reading and recognizing sentences. Results indicate that reading and recognition are interactive processes, involving conceptually driven and data driven operations; the interaction may be either automatic or controlled. Semantic and surface information are conceptualized as…

What errors in English subject-to-verb agreement reveal about the syntactic nature of sentence subjects was investigated. Participants in 3 experiments included 104 undergraduates and 64 members of a university community. Results suggest the abstract syntactic relation of subject controls/mediates verb agreement, not notional properties and…

This article reflects one session of a course in thinking and communicating for Pace University (New York) faculty. The purpose of the course was to heighten awareness that language can seriously misrepresent events which it describes, thus affecting students' ability to perceive, evaluate, and make day-to-day decisions. Beginning with a concrete…

Readers are "dumb" because they are not privy to the mind and intentions of the writer; and the failure of the unsuccessful writer is a failure to forecast what it is going to be like to be a dumb reader of the document. Sample sentences from students' writing illustrate the following types of writing problems, which force the reader to examine…

Four experiments are reported which examine the role of phrase structure, memory load, concreteness of materials and other variables in the recall of meaningful English sentences. Several major findings are reported. Concreteness of the stimulus materials consistently is an aid to recall; although this is predicted from an imagery interpretation…

Reviews discourse analytic and text comprehension studies for their contributions to a cognitive process view of writing, then reports on a study that combines discourse analysis with online pause data to determine how semantic propositions reflect sentence-level planning patterns. (FL)

Studied "pre-ambiguity" plausibility information, information about verb argument structure frequencies, and "post-ambiguity" constraints in undergraduates. All three types of constraints were helpful in the resolution of ambiguities. Ambiguity resolution becomes more difficult as the competitor interpretations becomes stronger. Study items are…

In a study conducted to examine the impact of language choice on cognitive complexity (the number of constructs in a person's interpersonal construct system), 93 undergraduate students completed a role category questionnaire that asked each subject to write a description of two people they knew. In one case that description was to be of a…