Discusses the impact of the cognitive revolution in psychology on reading research. Cognitive perspectives of reading have revealed complex processes ranging from simple peripheral visual processing in letter recognition to high order processes in text comprehension. It is also argued that a full account of reading skill should include…

The influence of word recognition and conceptual knowledge on readers' comprehension of narrative text has become a fundamental assumption associated with text processing in the primary grades. Features of conceptual knowledge such as prior knowledge, content knowledge, domain knowledge, and discourse knowledge are believed to be significant…

Summarizes good reading research published in journals during 1986, focusing on studies that deal with reading comprehension, prior learning, and word recognition. (SRT)

Two experiments examined developmental trends in children's lexical decisions for abstract and concrete words. The first experiment examined children's on-line comprehension of abstract and concrete words. Subjects were 15 second or third graders and 15 college adults at the University of Georgia. The second experiment provided a stronger test of…

A study examined the interrelationship among print-related skills developed prior to formal reading instruction and social class differences in these skills in 33 middle-class and working-class children attending one of two high quality, reading-oriented kindergarten classes. Two hypotheses were generated: (1) that correlations would emerge among…