The effects of manipulating the connective words "because" and "after" on fifth graders' reading comprehension was examined. The results provide no support for the notion that sentence length is related to comprehensibility or that implicit connectives are more difficult to comprehend. (HOD)

This study investigated the effect of signal words on the comprehension of 103 first year community college students. The signal words studied were cause and effect, comparison-contrast, chronological, and enumerative words. A 40 paragraph comprehension test consisting of five different paragraphs for each of eight signal words and a test…

The classes and class members of function words are examined in detail in this paper in order to determine those which are most basic and most important to comprehension at the kindergarten through first-grade level. Noun determiners and pronouns, verbal determiners, and prepositions were found to be of importance, as were a small number of…

Conceptual and syntactic strategies in reading a foreign language are considered with attention to the functioning of the sentence parser. Topics of analysis include: the theoretical background and the educational relevance of the question of strategies; a study of the relative importance of the two parsing principles (syntactically guided…