A large stratified sample of university undergraduate students differing in reading ability performed a diverse set of psychometric and information processing tasks in a study exploring the role of visual information processing skill as a component in reading ability. Using a correlation analysis of individual differences, the interrelationships…

This study compared childrens' apprehension of an unfamiliar story either read to them from an illustrated book or presented as a comparable televised film. Subjects were 48 children, 24 of them six to seven years old, and 24 nine to ten years old, who were randomly assigned to one medium condition and individually presented the story. Response…

An approach to foreign language instruction that emphasizes language acquisition rather than learning will emphasize the development of listening comprehension even at the expense of oral production, since research has shown that the latter does not suffer where the former is fostered. This approach tends to reduce the restrictive workings of the…

Sensitivity to story information that conflicted with expectations was examined in kindergarten, second, fourth, and sixth grade children. The children either read or listened to stories about familiar events. One story was consistent with children's "scripts" for these events, while the other story contained script-inconsistent information. All…

This study investigates the development of listener skills during childhood, and the effects of introducing a brief plan for effective listening on children's listener performances. The subjects were 96 children, 24 at each of four ages (four, six, eight, and ten years) who were asked to play the role of listener in a referential communication…

The four papers in this collection discuss language perception and comprehension and report on experiments in those areas. The first paper, "The Influence of Non-Linguistic Knowledge on Perceiving and Verifying Sentences," discusses the reliance of language perception and comprehension on the interaction of linguistic and world…

This paper reports the outcomes of a correlational study that examined the relationships between visual and auditory perceptual skills, on the one hand, and comprehension that is independent of decoding, on the other. Five sets of test scores--a visual perceptual test (Coloured Progressive Matrices), an auditory perceptual test (Auditory Motor…

This study investigated children's performance with the passive-transformation when both the mode of presentation and the mode of response were verbal. The study was also designed to provide a framework for the examination of theoretical issues regarding strategies in speech perception. Kindergarten and first-grade children individually heard 6…

In this investigation, the differences in psycholinguistic processing of written and spoken language and the psycholinguistic deficiencies of poor readers were studied by giving meaningful, anomalous, and random word strings to 18 good readers and 18 poor readers who were reading at the fourth grade level. It was found that in both spoken and…

The purpose of this study was to determine with precise measurements of time and carefully constructed posttests whether sighted students in a college course would save time and achieve higher scores when listening to cognitive information using variable time compressors as compared with students listening using normal speed tape recorders. The…

This study investigated the effect of the sex of an oral interpreter and the sex of the dramatic character portrayed on audience evaluation of performer effectiveness and audience comprehension of the passage presented. Two interpreters, one male and one female, each performed six monologues, three of which were feminine and three of which were…

Previous studies show that a listener has the potential to receive recorded information at a rate far exceeding the rates that are used for conversation and for the production of tape recordings. However, few studies have examined listeners' rate preferences. Thus, 48 elementary school children in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade listened to a series…

The purposes of this study were to examine the degree of comprehension shown by a group of college students when listening to a lecture at the normal rate of 175 words per minute and at the time-compressed rate of 275 words per minute for forty minutes, and to assess students' attitudes toward the new medium of time-compressed speech by means of a…

Fifty-eight students (in grades 5 and 6) of average or near-average intelligence (who were reading 2 or more years below their normal expected level and who learned best through the auditory modality) took part in a study to evaluate the following areas: the effectiveness of two auditory highlighting procedures for increasing listening…

The first of this series of studies on the ability of young children to follow directions was designed to find out which is easier for a preschool child: to follow directions given only by demonstration or given only verbally. Subjects were 108 white, middle class, 4-year-olds enrolled in a nursery school. Each teacher tested the children in her…