We report 3 studies investigating children's and adults' interpretation of ambiguous focus in sentences containing the focus-sensitive quantifier only. In each experiment, child and adult participants compared sentences with only in a preverbal position and counterpart sentences without only against a series of pictures depicting events that…

Readers construct at least 2 interrelated mental representations when they comprehend a text: a textbase and a situation model. Two experiments were conducted with recognition memory to examine how domain knowledge and text coherence influence readers' textbase and situation-model representations. In Experiment 1, participants made remember-know…

We examined whether the text understanding of students holding naive and sophisticated epistemological beliefs was differentially affected by text format, also controlling for effects of gender, word decoding, and prior knowledge on understanding. The participants were 39 Norwegian first-year teacher students, and the topic of reading was…

This document describes how the main principles of Perspective Text Analysis are implemented in the PC-system PERTEX, concentrating on the main steps of the analysis. The analysis starts with normal text and ends in a topological representation of the mentality that the text presents. The text material is processed in the following main steps: (1)…

A study investigated the role of prior knowledge in ambiguous text interpretation by directly measuring readers' knowledge of, and level of involvement with, three distinct topical domains that could be assigned during reading of an ambiguous passage. Subjects, 52 athletes of average or above average reading ability competing in one of three…

Drawing from various current grammar systems, this text provides a practical and easy-to-understand handbook of grammar for readers of expository prose (language written for explanation and read for understanding). The analysis in the book is designed to perform two functions: (1) help readers receive with clarity, if at all possible, the…

Writers construct meaning when they compose texts, and readers construct meaning when they understand and interpret texts. Building meaning through reading entails organizing, selecting, and connecting. Readers use previously acquired knowledge to operate on textual clues, organizing mental representations that include material they select from…

A study tested the effects of timed versus untimed practice using text passages containing inserted adjunct questions. These effects were measured in terms of performance on repeated, related, and unrelated test questions. Subjects were 47 college students in Florida randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group was allowed a fixed amount of…

A study investigated whether or not the global structure of a text influences its readability and how that influence might be related to the already recognized influences of vocabulary and sentence length. The subjects, 250 fourth-grade students in Quebec, each read four texts representing four different structures, four subjects, and two levels…

Two main types of schemata exist for reading: content schema, representing existing knowledge of objects and events; and textual schema, including knowledge of discourse structure and conventions. There are at least six major schema functions important to reading comprehension: (1) schemata provide slots for assimilating additional knowledge; (2)…

A study investigated the effects of training in the use of graphic organizers on the summarization strategies of disabled readers. Subjects, 21 disabled readers (with a mean age of 13 years, 7 months) from a reading clinic, received 5 hours of training in the use of graphic organizers to map expository passages. Instruction included training in…

Reading is best understood as a dialectic process where the influence of reader and text are constantly merging to create a jointly produced and evolving understanding. What occurs as the reader and text come together during reading is similar in form to a dialogue, a model for the reader-text relationship that has not been explored in the reader…

This paper describes an experiment in which 30 students, classified according to high and low analytical performance, were given a reading and text production test to determine their sensibility to the structure of an Icelandic saga. This material was used because of its extreme simplicity on the textual surface level, a property suited for…

Presents a new application for retrieving news from a large electronic bank of newspapers that is intended to manage past issues of newspapers. Highlights include a data model for newspapers, including metadata and metaclasses; document definition language; document retrieval language; and memory organization and indexes. (Author/LRW)

Reports on a study of genre and register that reaches the following conclusions concerning the teaching of language and literature: (1) teaching should concentrate on the move structure of genres and the concomitant move registers rather than the general register of a genre as a whole; and (2) the teaching of reading and writing should be…