Inference is discussed as a factor in the derivation of non-explicit antecedents and referents for three types of discourse anaphora: definite pronouns, "one"-anaphora, and verb phrase ellipsis. This derivation process is seen as being part of the normal process of text-understanding. It is claimed that the use of non-explicit…

Readers cannot profitably be studied without some assessment of the texts they read. Analyses of texts, however, are of doubtful value unless tested against readers' behavior. Despite the relative neglect of text in research on reading, numerous approaches to the analysis of text have been proposed. The developments within linguistics and the…

Finds that explicit anaphors only reactivated undergraduate students' target antecedents when they are both lexically and conceptually identical to a target antecedent; but as distance between an anaphor and its antecedent increased, even an explicit anaphor did not reactivate a target antecedent. Shows that distant antecedents were reactivated…

Presents a framework for expressing how choices are made in systemic grammars. Framework represents grammar as combination of systemic syntactic description and explicit choice processes called "choice experts." (DF)

Examines the influence of interclause connectives on inference generation. Finds that readers incorporate causal knowledge-based inferences in the discourse representations for sentences containing a causal connective, and that connectives elicit inferences that are based on the connective's meaning. (SR)

Reports on the results of four experiments that show that people can recognize ironic meanings that were not intended, and that processing unintended irony can be done easily precisely because speakers' utterances, unbeknownst to them, create ironic situations. Discusses implications for psycholinguistic theories of irony comprehension and for…

The assumption that "ideal" text grammars are valid descriptions of the schemata used by children to organize their recall of text was challenged in a study involving 150 elementary school children. The children, all with above-average reading ability, were classified as having one of three types of schemata: theme-initial (identifying…

An account of a research project based on the psycholinguistic theory of reading. Its purpose was to isolate, analyze and directly compare the use of syntactic, semantic and discourse constraints by readers of French either as a first or as a second language. (AMH)

The purpose of these studies was to test the hypothesis that thematization affects the probability that a probe word will produce meaning-preserving recall of a sentence that is part of a discourse. Sentences were constructed along the lines of subject-verb-object and were presented in three experiments: free recall of isolated sentences, prompted…

Investigates how readers use predication for the interpretation of referents in text and to develop a coherent model of the events described in text. Illustrates how two types of predication (scalar copredication and antipredication) induce readers to disambiguate the referents of definite noun phrases in essentially the opposite way, with…

Examines analysis of cohesion as an index of both social and cognitive factors. Oral language of reading disabled was studied and found to indicate some difficulties of the subjects when dealing with information under special social and cognitive conditions. (DF)

To relate the way in which children structure stories at different age levels to their performance on other tasks or to their general stage of cognitive development, a study required subjects of four age groups to participate in working memory tasks in two different paradigms and to generate stories involving a variety of characters. The structure…

This report presents the text analysis of "Babar Loses His Crown," a story for beginning readers. (The techniques used in arriving at the analysis are presented in a Reading Center Technical Report, Number 168, "Problems and Techniques of Text Analysis.") Tables are given for a statistical lexical analysis and for a syntactic…

A study investigated the readability of Norwegian law texts intended for both the legal profession and the public (e.g., laws regulating social insurance and public administration) that contained public information about tax payment. Six passages from the samples were rewritten by changing a number of specific morphological, lexical, and syntactic…

Learning activities that are associated with programed materials can be applied to learning from ordinary text; in fact, there is no essential difference between programed and ordinary text. Active response so important to programed learning can be controlled in textual materials by carefully defined adjunct aids such as word lists, underlining,…