To study the relationship between inferences made on standardized reading tests and item difficulty, 50 items on the reading comprehension section of the Metropolitan Achievement Test were analyzed independently in this study by two raters using four general categories of inferences: (1) reference inferences, (2) between proposition inferences,…

A study of eight adult chronic aphasic patients' comprehension of sentences and pictures in which comparisons of time and space were crucial was designed to assess A. R. Luria's approach to designing comprehension test tasks. The investigation required patients, with lesions of varying size and location, to determine whether a sentence expressing…

A study investigated some of the ways in which phenomena are perceived and translated into speech, especially in the assignment of agents in a given situation. Subjects were 16 adults with infant children. The adults were shown the Visual Cliff series of pictures of an infant crawling to its mother across a glass sheet covering an open space with…

In developing an interactive model of composing, this paper discusses three groups of reader-oriented theories, each of which provides composing theorists with some research and theory to use in developing such a model. First the paper discusses the main principle of the literary reader-response theorists--that the meaning and value of texts do…

A computer natural language system called HWIM (Hear What I Mean) is described in this report. Noting that the system accepts either typed or spoken inputs and produces both typed and spoken responses, the report proposes HWIM as an example of a relatively complete language system illustrating how the many components of language processing…

A study investigated processing differences between metaphorical and literal versions of the same sentences. The purposes of the study were (1) to directly compare the on-line processing demands of metaphoric and nonmetaphoric sentences, and (2) to examine the consequences of such sentences for memory performance. The subjects were 39 college…

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether the connective structure of a passage might protect interrelated information from interference by irrevelant information in sentence recognition. Subjects of both experiments were college students enrolled in introductory psychology classes. In each, a rating task for unconnected phrases was…

A paper dealing with the comprehension of metaphor and a second paper addressing the ramifications of the first paper's ideas for teaching practices are contained in this report. The opening section of the first paper explains why language theorists and scholars in a number of disciplines are interested in metaphor. Its next section deals with…

The reversal of subject and predicate terms in quantified, categorical expressions was studied as an operation that is potentially important in issues of representation and comprehension of quantified relations. In two experiments students were asked to evaluate the relation between two quantified expressions. The salience of reversal in the…

Relational-inference, a process associated with developmental change in performance on classification items, was investigated in two experiments. The accuracy and latency with which 20 subjects at each of 3 age levels (8, 11, and adult) stated relationships among concepts were tested. In experiment 1, 40 triplets of concepts related by a class…

The linguistic form of a nonliteral expression, and the context in which it occurs, can greatly influence young children's succcess or failure in assigning a meaning to a figurative expression. Experiments have shown that the same metaphorical expression can be easier to understand when expressed in a linguistic form that is familiar to young…

To test F. J. Morrison's conceptualization of reading disability as the failure to master the complex irregular system of rules governing sound-symbol correspondence in English (1980), a study investigated the speed with which disabled and normal readers processed short vowels, long vowels, and vowel digraphs. Subjects consisted of two groups of…

The study examined the encoding function in student note taking in relationship to learning from a university lecture. It was expected that note taking effectiveness would be positively related to learning; and, that the notes of high and low effective note takers would differ significantly. After pretesting, a 551-word lecture on research methods…

This essay, the concluding section of a larger study, examines the present state of cognitive science and instructional theory as reflected in the study's earlier chapters. Cognitive analyses of tasks are reported in the broad domain of language comprehension and production (e.g., understanding, composing, and answering questions about texts). The…

This study concerns a moment in the learning process which is considered crucial, namely, that point when the learner is confronted with the necessity of discovering from the models already learned and stored in memory elements that will be useful in constructing a new utterance or solving a new problem. The emphasis is on the point of connection…