A reader's background knowledge (schemata) and purpose for reading have an overriding influence upon the reader's development of meaning. Reading comprehension also involves activating, focusing, maintaining, and refining ideas toward developing interpretations that are plausible, cohesive, and complete. Recent examinations of instructional…

A reader's ability to recognize an author's top-level structure in a passage is a useful strategy for organizing textual information for memory purposes. Even without specialized training, many adults and some fifth grade children have this ability. Other children in fifth and ninth grades, and in classes for the mildly mentally handicapped, have…

The 8-chapter booklet gives an overview of what is known and what remains to be known about developmental dyslexia. Chapter 1 defines the scope of reading problems in general, while chapter 2 defines dyslexia-"children who have difficulty learning to read, for no apparent reason". Chapter 4 outlines the normal reading process. Possible causes for…

Five studies compared how skilled readers arrived at an understanding of what they were reading with how children learning to read comprehended primers. Undergraduate, second, fourth, and sixth grade students read orally stories in which various aspects of the stories were distorted (pronounceable nonwords substituted for real words, semantically…

Eye movement data were collected for 28 college students reading 32 sentences with sentence verification questions. The factors observed were target sentence voice (active/passive), probe voice, and correct response (true/false). Pairs of subjects received the same set of stimuli, but with agents and objects in the sentences reversed. As expected,…

One of the major assumptions of recent reading research has been that what the reader sees in the text plays as heavily in deteriming comprehension as does what the author says in the text. Although most researchers have tended to infer the reader's contributions by noting the differences between text structure and recall structures, there have…

A THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF THE READING PROCESS, BOTH PSYCHOLOGICAL AND LINGUISTIC, AND THE STUDIES DEVELOPING FROM THE ANALYSIS FORMED THE BASIS FOR THIS RESEARCH PROGRAM ON READING. A RESEARCH GROUP WAS ORGANIZED AS A LOOSE FEDERATION WITH EACH OF THE PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS PURSUING HIS OWN IDEAS AND TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEM. THE COMPLETED…

Fourth grade students' miscues occurring in signaled sentence combining exercises were compared with their reading miscues in a study relating cognitive style to miscue analysis of reading and writing. The records of 16 students were used, with reflective students and impulsive students so designated on the basis of their miscues per one-hundred…

The eye movements of two college graduates were monitored in a study of flexible reading, which is defined as the ability to adjust one's rate and approach to reading according to the purpose of reading, the difficulty of the material, and one's knowledge of the subject matter. The subjects were told to read an excerpt from a tenth grade biology…

This guide provides an overview of the language process, with sections focusing on the physiological aspects (organization of the brain), language development, environmental variables, cognition, language deficits and evaluation, language remediation, and implications of the reading process. Appendixes provide selected listings of developmental…

This study was primarily intended to explain the relationship between rated imagery, rated comprehension, and free recall in a sentence context. An additional purpose of the investigation was to examine the relationships between sentence imagery (determined by summing the individual values of component words), the rating of sentences as wholes,…

Two kinds of memory organization are distinguished: segregrated versus integrated. In segregated memory organizations, related learned propositions have separate memory representations. In integrated memory organizations, memory representations of related propositions share common subrepresentations. Segregated memory organizations facilitate…

This paper identifies three trends in reading research that reflect the shift from an emphasis on teaching method to the examination of individual and contextual variables, an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the reading process, and the effort to develop more comprehensive models of the reading process. Three studies of cross-age and…

Ninety kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade students participated in this study of ability to segment oral language into words and word units. Each child completed two individually administered oral segmentation tests and the Metropolitan Achievement Test. Results indicated that the ability to segment orally presented sentences developed…

Research on comprehension and recall in reading has been limited in the past to quantitative studies of the amount of text items recalled. This paper reports on two experiments that used a qualitative measure in order to investigate the differences between fluent and less fluent comprehenders and the recall processes they use. The first…