Reports on a study stemming from schema theory that assessed the role that background knowledge plays in determining young children's ability to process relationships that are explicitly and fully specified in a text, in comparison to those that are only partially specified by the same text. (Author/HOD)

Primary school children performed a discrete-trial Stroop task in which they named the colors of stimuli that either matched or did not match items that were being concurrently held in memory. Results indicated a developmental trend toward the color being named faster when the stimulus matched the item held in memory. (Author/HOD)

Contends that the "basics" in reading are not skills but concepts the learner must acquire, and that the learner's role is central to this teaching philosophy. (FL)

Poor readers' ability to use knowledge-based processing strategies was investigated by comparing good and poor readers' recall of familiar and unfamiliar text. Findings suggest that poor readers' comprehension suffers when their use of prior knowledge is restricted. (HOD)

Presents evidence from oral reading miscue research to support a psycholinguistic view of why omissions take place and how they reflect the reading process. Classifies word level omissions as deliberate and nondeliberate. (MKM)

The most important implication of a reader response textual model for the teaching of writing is that unless students know how to read they cannot learn how to write, and unless students know how to read well they will not write well. (HOD)

The dimensions that interact during reading acquisition include properties of texts, the acquisition of reading skills and strategies, the development of cognitive and language skills, the influence of instruction, and the effects of motivational, cultural, and language variables. Discusses how these interactions may occur and describes three…

A variable time delay naming latency paradigm was used to investigate the processing of noun-verb lexical ambiguities (e.g., "watch") in syntactic contexts that biased either the noun or the verb reading. Results support a two-stage model in which all reading of ambiguous words are initially accessed, followed by suppression of…

Argues that both oral and visual language acquisition may be innate human functions and calls for the examination of current reading programs in this light. (FL)

Suggests that critical reading and reading comprehension be taught separately at first to insure that students learn both to understand and to evaluate pieces of writing. (MKM)

Indicates some of the strengths and weaknesses of the cloze procedure as a way to help children learn to read, to determine comprehension, and to gain additional insights into how readers process language as they read. Suggests that the beginning reader is poorly judged by use of cloze. (TJ)

Attempts to develop a model for research in reader response to literature which accounts for three sources of variation: those among texts, readers, and contexts. (DD)

Reports on an investigation of the role of letter and order information in lexical access, using an interference paradigm in a lexical decision task. (Author/AM)

The study examines one aspect of the relationship between decoding and comprehension--that between word difficulty, decoding ability, and access of single-word meanings. Results indicate that decoding ease and extraction of word meanings are related and suggest that decoding ability must be considered a factor in reading comprehension. (RC)

Investigates how performance on syntactic structures is affected by the complexity of the surrounding sentence. To investigate possible relationships, two classifications of syntactic structures were tested in both simple and complex sentences. (RC)