For identifying children with four major kinds of verbal learning disabilities viz. reading disability, speech and language comprehension disability, writing disability and mathematics disability, the present task was undertaken to construct and standardize verbal learning disabilities checklist. This checklist was developed by keeping in view the…

Examines whether, after a single reading, the recall of text elements depends on the length of the passage. Results show more detail was remembered 23 hours later for short passages than for long. Concludes that negative effects of passage length on test performance were due in part to acquisition processes rather than retrieval. (EKN)

Comprehensibility ratings and sentence-by-sentence reading times of three-sentence narratives (triples) were studied as a function of the coherence of a triple. In both experiments, reading times did not differ for first sentences, but were longer for third sentences of unrelated than for related triples. (Author/RM)

A general theoretical framework for studying the representation of prose in memory is presented. The framework emphasizes the relational structure of story characters as determined by major story themes and provides for empirical consideration of author-reader communication. (SW)

Two experiments examined characteristics of text that determine when a repeated noun has a clearly identified referent. Verbs and article modifiers appeared to influence whether a noun is merely a repeated word in a text, or whether it is redundant at the propositional level. (SW)

French sentences with a long ambiguous word just before a target phoneme led to faster reaction times than did sentences with a short unambigous word just before the target phoneme. (Author/SW)

Experiments were conducted to determine the effects of sentence contexts on word recognition and reading. The questions of whether context is predominantly facilitating or inhibiting and how automatic the influence of contexts is on word retrieval were investigated. (SW)

The primary aim of the current study was to identify the strongest independent predictors of reading comprehension using word reading, language and memory variables in a normal sample of 180 children in grades 3-5, with a range of word reading skills. It was hypothesized that orthographic processing, receptive vocabulary and verbal working memory…

Conventional paragraph structure requires that the topic sentence be presented first, followed by connected, coherent sentences. The processing role of these rules was investigated by comparing performance on reading simple passages that conformed to or violated conventional paragraph organization. (Author/SW)