A study involving 59 undergraduate speech communication students investigated relationships between intelligence, understanding of editorial satire, and appreciation of satire. The students were asked to read three satirical essays and then to pick one of five statements that best described the thesis as intended by the author. Then each satire…

In a study of satire as persuasion, two experiments were conducted--one to determine whether dogmatism affected the understanding and appreciation of editorial satire, the second to determine the same about intelligence as measured by the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In the first experiment, 116 college students read three satirical editorials. After…

In an effort to understand why pictures are used to supplement learning material, a study explored (1) the role of humor in recall, and (2) whether the effects of humor are independent of the individual's ability level. Subjects--students from either the high SAT (approximate average of 1200 points) population (HS), or the low SAT (approximate…

Situation comedy (sitcom) dialogs that are included in PLATO lessons for first year Russian students are described. These comprehension exercises make use of both the touch panel and the audio capabilities of PLATO. The sitcom dialogs were written by a native speaker of Russian and are based on the vocabulary in the textbook plus a small number of…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 20 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: use of word information cues by beginning readers; the relationship between problem solving and oral reading strategies; the ease with which children learn…