In this study 60 first and fourth graders selected pictures that best represented the meanings of sentences read to them. Results indicated that children were instantiating the target words with specific concepts rather than bringing to mind abstract, undifferentiated meanings. (HOD)

According to a theory of textual cohesion, anaphoric references and noun phrase organizers may serve as cohesive ties linking separate sentences into unified paragraphs. This study revealed that only the noun phrase organizer condition was significant in promoting comprehension and indicated no difference in time scores by paragraph condition.…

Focusing on four diverse areas, this paper highlights the contribution of several major schools of thought in the field of psychology to the understanding of the process involved in reading comprehension. (Author/DS)

Describes a procedure for helping students understand and work mathematical word problems. (MKM)

An account of a research project based on the psycholinguistic theory of reading. Its purpose was to isolate, analyze and directly compare the use of syntactic, semantic and discourse constraints by readers of French either as a first or as a second language. (AMH)

A general theoretical framework for studying the representation of prose in memory is presented. The framework emphasizes the relational structure of story characters as determined by major story themes and provides for empirical consideration of author-reader communication. (SW)

Reviews psychometric and experimental studies of performance differences on serial memory tasks between skilled and less skilled readers. Offers basic criticisms of the psychometric approach and discusses the experimental research within the context of a general model of short term memory. (AA)

The development of cognitive processes is essential to the development of reading comprehension skills. (MKM)

This article discusses ways of analyzing errors made in oral reading; interpreting mistakes in the correct way enables the teacher to understand why the reader is making them and to help overcome the reading difficulties they indicate. (JD)

Focuses on four kinds of reading/writing actions which readers and writers need to perform and which are based on two actions necessary to phonic competence: the blending of sounds together (synthesis) and the splitting of a sound into its component parts (analysis). (JM)

Identifies strategies used by 24 tenth grade students to comprehend a short story, and relates the strategies to ability, interest, and writing style. (AA)

In these studies, people recalled additional, previously unrecalled information from stories following instruction to take a new perspective. The data clearly show the operation of retrieval processes independent from encoding processes. (SW)

This study deals with the patterns of word-by-word reading times over a sentence when the subject must code the linguistic information sufficiently for immediate verbatim recall. A class of quantitative models is considered that would account for reading times at phrase breaks. (Author/RM)

Results of a study of early reading responses of young children in a Finnish preschool challenge the belief that grapheme-phoneme regularity is a critical factor in beginning reading. (JM)