Establishes a significant correlation between the extent of Creole language interference and performance on a British reading comprehension test. Suggests that Creole affects the efficiency of understanding British English. (Author/RL)

Examines how type of referent (name versus pronoun) influences comprehension of short passages. Provides strong support for central predictions of centering theory: (1) using a repeated name to refer to the central entity of a discourse disrupts comprehension; and (2) this disruption interacts with whether there is a continuing or shifting…

This study inspected the processes of verifying the current discourse constituent against the referents that it passively cues during reading. It seemed plausible that, after understanding "The customer ate pancakes," the processes of fully understanding "The waiter implied that the customer ate eggs" might resemble those of intentionally…

In recent years, memory-based and explanation-based theories have dominated the discourse processing literature. Numerous studies have been conducted to show support for each of the two views. Most of these studies have manipulated factors in the episodic memory trace of texts, without a great deal of focus on how general world knowledge impacts…

The present study investigated the relative contributions of experiential and ability factors to second language (L2) passage comprehension and L2 vocabulary retention. Participants included a cross section of 99 adult learners of Spanish as a foreign language enrolled in beginning through advanced level university Spanish courses. Participants…

In this study, we used a novel cognitive paradigm and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) to investigate the neural substrates involved in processing three different types of sentences. Participants read either metaphoric ("Some surgeons are butchers"), literal ("Some surgeons are fathers"), or non-meaningful sentences…

Types of reading disabilities (RD) have not yet been investigated in students classified with emotional disturbance (ED). The prevalence of RD and differentiating characteristics were examined in 118 middle school students attending a self-contained school for ED students by defining RDs with reading standard scores less than 85 on the two…

The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between spelling knowledge and reading skills among a group of 16 intermediate-level Arab learners of English as a second language (ESL) and a corresponding comparison group of 21 intermediate-level ESL learners in an English for academic purposes (EAP) program. A spelling task was used…

A study investigated whether: (1) deletion of relationals, which are function words in Japanese, from Japanese text affects the text processing strategies of native and nonnative readers, as measured by indices of reading time and comprehension; (2) nonnative readers' proficiency levels affect reading strategies when processing Japanese texts with…

Designed to assess comprehension of written ambiguous and polysemous structures, this instrument is a series of written statements that include varying degrees and types of ambiguity. In the first part of the test students are asked to identify (from a choice of three) semantically acceptable paraphrases for an initial sentence. Then students must…

Three experiments used "rhyme priming," a methodology in which lexical decisions to a visually presented word are facilitated when the word is preceded by a rhyming word, to investigate the access and maintenance of speech-based codes in sentence comprehension. In these experiments, the pairs were visually dissimilar rhymes, such as…

This paper draws on recent research findings in contending that starting with a student's "known" is a particularly sophisticated concept that, when understood both theoretically and practically, will permit teachers to help students read their texts with greater ease. It argues that students may have more prior knowledge about a topic…

The effects of number signals on text recall were investigated using college-age subjects who read and recalled two texts containing 10 target sentences each. Results demonstrated that number signals directed attention to the sentences they marked, led to better encoding of target information, and influenced the process recall. (Author/LMO)

Presents study performed to clarify the role that imagery plays in sentence understanding. Results show that reading selectively interferes with comprehension of high-imagery sentences and demonstrates that sentence comprehension is not a process that is independent of the decoding stage. (Author/BK)

This paper demonstrates that language users exploit overspecification both in production and in comprehension of text. Controlled discourse production experiments show that the use of overspecification depends on theme shifts; comprehension studies test the claim that the differential use of anaphoric references correlates with thematic structure…