Our understanding of a story is highly dependent upon our ability to recognize the underlying purpose for actions described in the story. We need to view those actions as steps in, or reactions to, plans. This paper sketches some of the components of a model for the understanding of plans and social actions. The model is first applied to narrative…

Describes two experiments testing the hypothesis that thematic titles largely relieve the reader of the task of constructing a sense from coherent texts. Finds that such titles significantly increase free recall of structured or slightly disorganized texts, while only prolonged reading allows titles to raise recall of an unstructured text. (MES)

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)

Memory representations of statements from a story were predicted to cluster into separate episode chunks in memory. It was shown that the recall of episode depends on the length of that episode, but not on the lengths of other episodes. The chunking idea was confirmed. (SW)

Experimental investigations of children's prose comprehension with special emphasis on the development of skills necessary for reading comprehension are examined in this paper. The research is discussed under four major headings which correspond to specific comprehension skills: identifying main ideas, understanding logical structure, making…

Investigates the language comprehension of elementary school children and the factors that affected acquisition of knowledge from connected discourse. Factors examined included oral and written language, message structure, characteristics of the learner, and conditions of the learning situation. (AA)

College students wrote summaries of short passages to assess their ability to identify important information. Naive summaries judged as "better" contained more major semantic roles, such as agent, than did summaries judged "not as good". Students wrote better summaries when instructed to use major semantic roles within the passage. (Author/RD)

Five orders of approximation to normal English prose were constructed; 5th, 10th, 25th, 50th, and 100th plus. Five cloze tests were then constructed by inserting blanks for deleted words in 5 word segments (5th order), 10 word segments (10th), 25 word segments (25th), 50 word segments (50th), and 100 word segments of five different passages of…

A schema-based framework for representing knowledge and prose organization was studied. Testing of a script pointer and tag hypothesis confirmed that memory discrimination is better for atypical actions in a passage than for typical script actions and that there is no memory discrimination for very typical actions. (SW)