We suggest that the American poet E.E. Cummings was probably mildly dyslexic. Evidence, which is drawn in particular from inspection of his archival papers, includes consideration of his spelling, letter formation, handwriting, approach to page orientation, proclivity for exploration of the mirror-image, reading and educational history, struggles…

We compared the effects of the effects of self-instructions in the form of prose or song lyrics in the acquisition of gross motor tasks in 4 third-grade children. We taught participants 4 pairs of gross motor tasks, with one task in each pair taught with prose self-instructions and the other taught with song lyric self-instructions. Both…

Discourse processing involves an interaction of text based processes and prior knowledge. It was shown that college students varied in their relative employment of knowledge-based processes, and that individuals tended to be more "text bound" when they were more "stimulus bound" according to an embedded figures test.…

Describes conceptualization of compensation that applies to life span cognitive development, in general, and aging of prose processing skills, in particular. Presents model of forms and processes of compensation that directs attention to developing dynamics of cognitive skills and compensatory mechanisms. Outlines three main approaches to research…

The effects of level of adjunct question (factual, application) and type of feedback (no feedback, correct answer feedback, self-correction feedback) on learning concepts from prose were examined in a study of 135 volunteer undergraduates at Iowa State University. Adjunct application questions produce better performance on subsequent new…

Forty children listened to stories and then answered questions about temporally neutral and temporally tagged information. Observed interactions among age, additional processing, and kind of information demonstrated the importance of the distinction between these types of information for developmental studies of memory of prose. (Author/DB)

The effects of subsequent related information and cognitive flexibility on prose recall were studied. Subjects read a passage; then were given either consistent or contradictory information. Errors in cued recall, reflecting the subsequent information, were more frequently produced after a three-week delay than after two days. (Author/GDC)

Field-independent and field-dependent college students studied a 1525-word article under a preferred or nonpreferred study condition (read only, underline, or note taking). Half of the subjects reviewed the material prior to an examination and half did not. Results indicated that field-independent subjects who used a nonpreferred study technique…

The effect of cognitive style on the performance of four groups of college students (n=326) who used different strategies of study to comprehend prose was investigated. The cognitive styles of the subjects (field dependence/independence) interacted with the strategies of study and seem to affect performance on comprehension of prose at posttest.…

The preferred coding processes of 11-year-old children were investigated, as well as the effect of these preferences on recall of verbal material which varied by complexity of imagery, metaphor, and acoustic and semantic features. The hypothesized relationship between coding and personality was studied (f=fiche number). (MH)

Two experiments examined children's ability to apply three different standards for evaluating their understanding. Five-, seven-, nine-, and eleven-year-old children were presented with short narrative passages within which were embedded three types of problems (nonsense words, internal inconsistencies, and prior knowledge violations), each of…

Two studies were conducted to find correlates of personality or cognitive style that were exemplified in differences in recall of semantic information from text. In both studies the texts were analyzed for the pattern of subordination, or hierarchy, of the semantic information that was contained in the passages using a method described by Meyer.…

High school students read textual passages organized around a semantic, temporal, or random theme. Free recall, semantically, and temporally-cued tests measured recall. During free recall, the organized passages yielded greater recall. For the cued tests, more words were remembered when the passage organization matched the type of test cue.…

The verbal-imagery code test appeared to differentiate between individuals on their immediate recall of prose materials which differed in style with respect to the amount of visual description and semantic complexity. These findings are consistent with the view that there is a verbalizer-imager learning style continuum. (Author/SJL)

The effectiveness of having 51 students generate their own headings for scientific text is assessed. Results reveal that generating headings enhances performance on a number of recall measures compared to either author-provided headings or no headings. (Author)