The research reported here casts doubt on the general value of the Yngve hypothesis, which relates a phrase structure measure of syntactic complexity to both sentence production and memory. (Author/FWB)

Reviews major issues in research on reading, including theories of word reading, cross-writing comparisons, comprehension, reading difficulties, learning how to read, and cognitive neuroscience studies of reading. (Author/VWL)

Norms of free association to common ambiguous English words are reported. Responses were categorized on the basis of sense relevance. On this basis, the sense dominance of the words was quantified, and the degree of ambiguity associated with each word estimated by the information measure U. This publication will be of interest primarily to…

Comments on several quantitative approaches to semantic knowledge representations (the focus of this special issue). Points out some of the ways in which Latent Semantic Analysis and Hyperspace Analog to Language fall short of being plausible theories about psychological reality. Examines in-principle failures and wrong-kind failures that arise in…

It is suggested that twin discourse functions are served by thematization and topicalization, the former providing stable referential focus and the latter providing momentary referential focus. (Author/AM)

Much of the current research in reading processes has been aided by movements in experimental psychology known as information processing psychology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive science. The information processing movement has contributed three important ideas: (1) Logogen theory of a cognitive response unit that is sensitive to the set of…

A study is reported in which short-term memory capacity, estimated by a probe digit task, and memory for structured language, measured by a probe discourse task, were investigated in an experiment with third and fifth grade IQ-matched children representing two levels of reading comprehension skill. (Author/RM)

Presents three mini-essays reviewing progress made on three problems in text comprehension (two traditional and one newer problem): their relationship between sentence processes and text processes; individual differences in discourse comprehension; and the representation of multiple-text information, which exposes fresh views of problems of…

Following reading and listening tasks, adult long-term memory is high in semantic information and low in syntactic and lexical information. Comprehension during reading and listening must depend to some extent, however, on short term retention of linguistic information that is less abstract and shares more features of the input than the semantic…

Thematization, the relative frequency of a discourse referent, and topicalization are conceptualized as related discourse functions. In a probe recall experiment, a word with a thematized referent was a better recall probe than a word with a nonthematized referent. Also, an agent noun was a better prompt than a recipient, and this semantic…

The notion that a set of restricted-generalized abilities underlies both reading and writing is explored in this essay. Following a definition of schooled language competence (SLC), the first section asserts that knowledge and problem solving are insufficient and nonlinguistic approaches to language competence. The second section focuses on…

Features of a model of reading that is both sensitive to individual differences and consistent with the assumption that reading processes are interactive are discussed in this report. A description of how this model accounts for individual differences in reading skill suggests three types of reading problems: slow word decoding, slow sentence…