A study was conducted to demonstrate the value of a mnemonic strategy in remembering information from prose passages and to assess processing differences associated with three variations of the mnemonic strategy. The subjects were 220 eighth grade students who read four short fictional biographies and answered recall questions that were either…

Five experiments were conducted on the ways that college students processed ambiguous words in sentences. Two classes of ambiguous words (noun-noun and noun-verb) and two types of context (priming and nonpriming) were investigated using a variable stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) priming paradigm. Noun-noun ambiguities consisted of two semantically…

The main experience of an ideal reader while reading a text is an "envisionment" of that text, a representation in the reader's mind of the content of the text. According to this view the envisionment grows and sometimes changes as the reader progresses through the text, and the ideal reader not only updates and supplements the…

The last of eight related documents, this booklet is part of a series of papers presented at the 1978 National Right to Read Conference examining issues and problems in literacy. In examining the impact of the back to basics movement on literacy, the booklet cites evidence that the movement suffers from a lack of consensus on the meaning of…

Avoidance as a strategy for error-free production in a second language is shown to be unavailable to the student when the second language is linguistically similar to the native language. In avoidance, the student "steers around" those aspects of the grammar of the target language with which he/she is unfamiliar. By restricting linguistic…

Differences in semantic recall between students hypothesized as having either a high or a low analytic style were investigated. Styles were determined by the amount of bilateral alpha activity measured from the cerebral cortex of the brain during eyes-open baseline recordings. The results indicated that when expository text was tightly structured,…

Gestures of six young adults were transcribed from videotaped narrations. Iconic, or imitative, gestures were found to have a tendency to depict whole scenes, and to correlate positively with motions implied in accompanying verbs. Gestures were found to be marked for such contrasting grammatical features as agent and patient, and transitive and…

The ability of kindergarten, second and fourth grade children (N=90) to interpret meanings related to two categories of conversational implicature, bridges and flouts, was investigated. Bridges and flouts are types of indirect reply to a speaker's utterances that require a hearer to infer the reply's relevance to the preceeding conversation. Each…

The study of schema theory as part of the inquiry into the nature of language comprehension has drawn attention to the reader's central role in the construction of text-guided meaning. Contemporary schema theory represnts a major step in the effort to move away from a reductionist view of reading comprehension. Specifically, it focuses on wbat…

Much of the current research in reading processes has been aided by movements in experimental psychology known as information processing psychology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive science. The information processing movement has contributed three important ideas: (1) Logogen theory of a cognitive response unit that is sensitive to the set of…

This study defines the notion of communication methodology, situates the context in which it operates, and concentrates on the problem of the acquisition of knowledge in general, and of language acquisition, in particular. From the notion of methodology, the study moves to the method of global communication, that is, a method comprising four…

This paper indicates the relevance of psycholinguistic research to the study of the interpretation process. Citing selected experiments that demonstrate some of the possibilities for extending research into the language experience of the interpreter, the paper argues that such an approach might lead into examining the experience of imagery,…

It is proposed in this paper that a developmental continuum functions between metaphors and the perception of metaphoric referents in both ordinary and aesthetic language use, and three levels of the metaphoring act are isolated: perceptual, analogical, and evaluative. These levels appear justified in terms of their functional association with…

A complete analysis of a story's structure must rely on more than a simple grammar of story components; it requires a consideration of the characters' plans as they are stated or implied in the story. Furthermore, these plans are recognized as the characters' beliefs, and beliefs about interactions among plans are crucial determinants of a story's…

Three problems in the use of eye movement data for the study of language processing are discussed in this report: the perceptual span problem, the data summary problem, and the eye-mind lag problem. Recent research on perception during reading that bears on these problems is also described. Finally, a general approach to the use of eye movement…