Much of the current controversy in the area of story theory derives from a failure to make clear the distinctions among theories of (1) plan comprehension, (2) narrative comprehension, and (3) story schema. A theory of plan comprehension attempts to account for the ability of humans to interpret the observed actions of another person in terms of…

Two experiments were conducted in order to determine whether children are able to make analogies in learning to read. In the first experiment, 24 children from a primary school were taught three types of word pairs--only one pair of which was analogies--and then tested. Results showed not only that children are aware that consistency of spelling…

Defining schemas as higher order cognitive structures that serve a crucial role in providing an account of how old knowledge interacts with new in perception, language, thought, and memory, this paper offers an analytic account of the nature and functions of schemas in psychological theory and organizes some of the experimental evidence dealing…

Models of similarity have traditionally assumed that the similarity relation is symmetrical. However, when reversed, similarity statements frequently have different properties from those of the original. Previous attempts to account for the asymmetry of similarity have focused only on literal comparisons, resulting in a tendency to underestimate…

Intended for teachers, this book reports an assessment of reading achievement in the Irish schools of first year postprimary pupils. Chapters discuss background information, the research procedure, the survey findings, "backwardness" in reading, and the researcher's conclusions. The book concludes with an abstract that lists some of the…

A study investigated the effectiveness of semantic mapping as a technique to improve recall of word meaning versus the traditional method of teaching vocabulary. Eight intermediate-level students from grades 4, 5, and 6, five of whom were identified as learning disabled students, were subjects. They were tested using vocabulary subtests of the…

Reports on a visual-auditory analysis of each of the 1575 e-ending words found on the "Rinsland Vocabulary List" to determine whether the e should be considered as a diacritic. (RB)

Reports the reading achievement during grades one through four of children who participated in a two-year, pre-first grade language arts program. (RB)

Confirms previous findings that young children do not have an adequate concept of what constitutes the spoken "word." (RB)

Reports that a significant effect of test anxiety on performance was obtained with high anxious subjects performing significantly better under both the motivating circumstances than under the control conditions. (RB)

Indicates that the assessment of reading comprehension should be evaluated in the light of potentially differential benefits resulting from the test form and its interactive effects on children with particular trait dispositions. (Author)

Contains a review of the literature in reading research during 1973. (RB)

Recent studies have offered support for a constructive view of sentence memory in children, based on their preference in recognition errors for true inferences, which can be drawn from input sentences, over false inferences. However, with the materials used in these studies, this preference may reflect responding either on the basis of semantic or…

In a recent note, Catlin and Jones (1976) argued that the sentence picture comparison model of Carpenter and Just (1975) could not account for the results obtained in studies where the picture preceded the sentence. In the present note, it is argued that the model can handle the results without adding additional parameters and that the Carpenter…

Reading is a process that bridges the distinction between perceptual and cognitive processes but the formalisms of the information processing approach to the study of reading apply most naturally either to models assuming a series of noninteracting stages of information processing or to a set of independent parallel processing units. This paper…