Reading is a fascinating cognitive process through which individuals perceive arbitrary symbols on a page and turn them into vivid mental representations of text. Most available evidence supports an embodied explanation for how readers are capable of such representations--they recruit supralinguistic brain regions in order to mentally simulate the…

Little is known about conceptual integration processes and their contributions to memory representations that are constructed in sentence comprehension among adults with underdeveloped literacy skills. We measured word-by-word reading time to examine variation of responsiveness to demands of lexical and conceptual processing during sentence…

The Institute for Education Sciences identifies main idea and summarization instruction as effective practices for improving adolescent students' reading comprehension. Main idea generation is a higher-level comprehension skill that requires students to read the text, connect information across the paragraph or section, determine the most…

Because teachers are asking for specific suggestions to help students apply comprehension skills and read content material, a mechanism that assists students in acquiring and applying specific comprehension skills as they read content texts is being investigated. The mechanism is called marginal gloss because learning activities are placed in the…

The linguistic form of a nonliteral expression, and the context in which it occurs, can greatly influence young children's succcess or failure in assigning a meaning to a figurative expression. Experiments have shown that the same metaphorical expression can be easier to understand when expressed in a linguistic form that is familiar to young…

Discusses issues raised during the course of a research project conducted to determine the place of comprehension activities in the teaching of English, including the question of whether the development of comprehension activities has any place in the teaching of English at the 12-grade level. (DF)

Describes a question-answering procedure for probing the reader's internal representation of prose. Examines two dimensions of a reader's conceptual organization of plot: hierarchical level and relational density of propositions. (PMJ)

Explanations for differences in reading proficiency should be constructed around an atlas of reading-related individual differences in cognition. Such an atlas should include well-documented "bottom-up", text-driven reading strategies and less thoroughly investigated "top-down", schema-driven reading strategies. Research…

Studies how children negotiate the meaning of literature by examining how they responded when given the opportunity to retell a story directly after hearing it. (DF)

To discover whether increased exposure to and understanding of figurative uses of language would result in improved performance on a metaphorical language comprehension test, gains were measured on a figurative language test that was administered twice, approximately four months apart, to a total of 319 elementary school children in Harlem, New…

Explores the relevance of a model for second language (L2) lexical organization and processing, with particular attention to its mental lexicon components, i.e., concepts, lemmas, and lexemes; and organization. Argues that the process of inferring the features of unknown words in a reading passage can be described in terms of lemma construction,…

The responses of students, asked to retell stories they had read, were studied through language miscue analysis. The research yielded insights in how readers: (1) predict the author's message; (2) form concepts essential for comprehension; and (3) relate stories to their cultural background. Implications for classroom instruction are discussed.…

Second language reading research based on a psycholinguistic approach was undertaken. A model of the language user derived from the literature on first language acquisition was used. The role of conceptualization on second language reading, including the effects of interference and other factors in the first language, is discussed, and…

A training study, consisting of three treatment cycles for a total of nine 50-minute class sessions, was conducted to determine the combined effect of directed reading-thinking activity (DRTA) and conceptual mapping as organizational strategies for college freshmen of low writing ability. Each cycle included DRTA instruction, mapping, discussion,…

Investigates the effects of science students' domain-specific knowledge and language proficiency on local lexical and syntactic processing and on semantic and higher conceptual processing of biology texts written in the students' first and second languages. Results indicate that language proficiency affects lower-level processing and…