Prepared as part of a larger work on human intelligence, this report examines basic attentional and perceptual contributions to intelligence. The report is organized into two sections: the first summarizes and evaluates research that has tried to uncover basic information processing skills that account for individual differences in intelligence;…

Strategies used by 15 fifth and sixth grade students to comprehend written problem solving tasks were identified. A naturalistic protocol analysis procedure was used to gather and analyze students' verbal and written responses to 55 selected reading and thinking tasks. In the ten tasks selected for detailed analysis, students demonstrated marked…

A study examined the effects of within domain processing on the recall of idea units as well as the potential reversals in performance resulting from the passing of time. Subjects for the experiment were 89 undergraduate students randomly assigned to six conditions related to target words in a reading passage: counting e's, determining the…

In the most adequate psycholinguistic model of the reading process the proficient silent reader decodes directly from graphic surface structure into deep structure, with no decoding into oral surface structure. Three cue systems used by all proficient readers include graphic cues (letters and words), syntactic cues (the grammatical arrangement of…

Reading comprehension includes both how much a reader remembers and how well the reader understands what has been read. It is dependent upon processing meaning. A model for how this is done includes three steps: identifying important elements of the text, constructing representations of important text information, and matching the representations…

As six subjects read a history text, their eye movements/fixations were monitored and recorded. A processing profile was created for each subject, and the correlations between pairs of profiles were computed. The correlations were all positive, but quite small. Although the differences between correlations were not large enough to indicate a…

THE FULL TEXTS OF INVITATIONAL ADDRESSES GIVEN AT THE 1965 INTERNATIONAL READING ASSOCIATION (IRA) CONVENTION IN DETROIT, MICHIGAN, BY SIX RECIPIENTS OF IRA CITATION AWARDS ARE PRESENTED. GATES SUGGESTS STEPS IRA SHOULD TAKE TO REVIVE AND REDIRECT READING RESEARCH. MCCALLISTER DISCUSSES THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE CHANGING AND EXPANDING VOCABULARY OF…

Several theories of story structure are reviewed in this paper, including those of D. Rumelhart, R. Schank, and T. van Dijk. Examples are given of Rumelhart's story grammar consisting of elements such as setting, episodes, events, and reactions that must be present to form a coherent structure. Schank's contribution to story structure theory is…

One of the most widely respected features of English orthography is its sequential redundancy. Its psychological reality is evidenced by the relative ease with which good readers can encode sequentially redundant nonwords as compared to arbitrary strings of letters. Its psychological importance is implicated by evidence that this advantage is…

A model has been developed for studying the relation between text structure and reading comprehension, emphasizing the reader's use of world knowledge and text-structural knowledge to evaluate and interpret meaning from text. When the highlights of the model are considered from the perspective of various expository texts used in research on…

To conceptualize a reader's comprehension of text as a semantic and interpretive processing of information, it is necessary to take note of interactions among persons and texts and conditions under which the texts are to be comprehended. A Computer-Assisted Language Analysis System (CALAS) was constructed which focuses on the text as any…

Theoretical models of the reading process have been proposed by F. Smith, E. J. Gibson and H. Levin, and D. LaBerge and S. J. Samuels. These models were examined using the following questions: How are features of print processed by the brain? How important are prior knowledge and expectations to the process (top-down or bottom-up processing)? Is…

The two reported studies examined children's approaches to and success in conceptualizing a literal main idea in reading. The first study examined elementary pupils' ability to formulate a main idea for brief, carefully controlled paragraphs written with one specific but unstated main idea. The study revealed that although subjects' grade…

Rigorously articulated conversational studies (based on George Kelly's personal construct theory) of the reading of complete texts raise new questions about the cognitive processes by which meaning is attributed to the printed word. Four generative models are examined: probabilistic, phrase structure, transformational, and semantic. No single…

This study of the reading process was written by a librarian for other librarians in order to explore what happens as the end result of the librarian's job, the meeting of a person and a book. A model of the reading act is constructed which makes the reader the subject rather than the receiver, as in the communications model of "transmitter…