Thirty-two fourth grade students were divided into two equal-sized groups according to reading ability. Each student read and recalled four passages from fourth-grade texts. The passages were either an original version, a semantic simplification, a syntactic simplification, or a combined rewrite. One week later, each child read and recalled…

Four studies examined the validity of the "Living Word Vocabulary" (LWV), a corpus of approximately 44,000 alphabetized words with multiple meanings tested at different grade levels. Regressions were performed between the grade level p-values (percentages of students responding correctly to a vocabulary test item) reported by LWV and…

Investigated within-sentence contextual constraints in a sentence-completion task completed by 408 students from grade 6. (AA)

The purposes of this study were to identify the best predictor or predictors of paragraph comprehensibility and to attempt to interpret that predictor as a skill. Forty-two passages of differing readability (ranging from grade 2.5 to 10.0) were analyzed for within word, within sentence, and between sentence characteristics. The measures used for…

The effect of the interaction between imagery level and number of semantic propositions on junior high readers at three ability levels was studied, using an instrument that compared two levels of imagery at each of five levels of semantic propositions. Syntax, word frequency, and number of arguments were held constant. The results indicated that…

Some 2700 Belgian students (grades five through twelve) participated in this study of the relationships between linguistic features of passages and passage readability estimated from cloze procedures. Clozed versions of each of 60 test passages were prepared and administered to students at various grade levels. Twenty-five linguistic features of…

Reports on a classroom experiment testing the hypothesis that the distance across which readers must integrate information is a factor in reading comprehension. Concludes that secondary school students found it more difficult to resolve semantic relationships beyond the sentence than those within the sentence. (FL)

Because vocabulary control in children's reading materials is largely based on vocabulary lists and studies which are now obsolete, new areas of learning are being considered for developing beginning reading materials. Instead of basing vocabulary lists on frequency counts and adult reading materials, the three approaches examined here are…

To ascertain whether subjects spanning the range of reading acquisition exhibit semantic constructivity when confronted with a silent reading task, a study was conducted involving 120 second, fifth, and seventh graders, and 30 graduate students. For purposes of the study, semantic constructivity was defined as the uncued production of inferences…

The need for preparing materials which are comprehensible to disadvantaged children led to this study in which verbs were simplified in an effort to determine whether such simplification might increase the likelihood of passages being understood by disadvantaged black students. The hypothesis was based on a 1927 study which found that 18 verbs,…

A study investigated the effect of properties of words and texts on the incidental learning of word meanings during normal reading. Subjects--352 students in third, fifth, and seventh grades--read either expository or narrative passages selected from grade-level textbooks, and after six days were tested on their knowledge of difficult words from…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 12 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the relationship of text organization to readability and reading ability; how advance organizers, outlining, and other preparatory procedures affect learning and…