A substantial amount of research has focused on children's reading development and reading problems, but in comparison there has been relatively little research into children's reading comprehension. This article provides an overview of the research that has investigated the skills and cognitive processes that support children's understanding of…

Respectively, three experiments indicate that (1) people can identify all the terminal units in stories as well as different kinds of episodic structure; (2) when attention was focused on the intermediate units, the Goal Path emerged in the judgments; and (3) the same judgments about terminal units were made even when the number of sentences per…

In a study designed to further define individual differences in reading comprehension, 200 students enrolled in developmental reading courses at a large urban university participated in an experiment that investigated the relationship between personality type and reading comprehension. The students took a reading comprehension test consisting of…

The spontaneous use of imaging and its relationships to verbal recall and literary analysis were investigated in a study in which 72 college students read a literary text under one of three sets of instructions that manipulated processing depth in an externally valid fashion. Imagery reports and free verbal recalls of the story were collected…

To better understand the early stages of literacy, a study investigated how young children learn about the registers of the written story genre. Subjects, 47 kindergraten children, were individually read to and then asked to "pretend-read" one or two selected picture storybooks on three consecutive days; their readings were audiotaped…

Proceeding from a definition of "story schema" as an idealized internal representation of the parts of a typical story and the relationships among those parts, this paper explores the role of story schemata in reading comprehension. The paper also identifies variables that may affect the way in which schemata function and outlines the…