This three-part book, a collection of articles by some of the foremost researchers in language comprehension, examines the thought processes involved in listening to conversation or in reading a page of text. The first part of the book deals with what the reader stores from a page during and after comprehension; it investigates the reader's use of…

Current research in reading indicates that what the reader brings to the printed page is far more important to comprehension than the information appearing there. This paper presents a model of how the integration of reading and writing skills can be undertaken, thereby strengthening both skill areas. With selections from a literary text and a…

This study was designed to investigate the relationship between reading achievement and syntactic attainment. Two measures were used to provide the data: the Gates MacGinitie Reading Test, Survey E, and the Sentence Construction Test, Level E. The measures of reading and syntax were administered to 96 seventh-grade students in two suburban junior…

The purpose of this study was to compare the performance of ninth-grade slow readers with ninth-grade good readers and with sixth grade readers on a test of syntactic comprehension. The significant difference between the ninth-grade good readers' and the ninth-grade slow readers' performance on A Test of Sentence Meaning (ATSM), developed by…

A 40-item nonsense word list was administered to 27 first-graders who had been taught letter-sound correspondences in isolation. The results displayed a succession of stages through which subjects apparently passed. At the second stage, subjects could sound letters but not blend the sounds into words; at the third stage, subjects could sound some…

One hundred six recent articles are abstracted that are relevant to research carried on in the Word Identification activity. The articles cover investigations on intersensory integration, response mediation, and facets of response learning. (Author)

This study investigated the developmental relationships between a battery of cognitive tasks--including Piagetian operations of conservation, classification, and seriation--and early reading achievement. Subjects were 128 kindergarten through third-grade students at a suburban elementary school. They were administered a battery of cognitive tests…

This study presents an account of position saliency in terms of children's ability to utilize graphic information, and in particular the serial encoding of information from letters in a graphic pattern. By varying the number and position of the letters distinguishing graphic patterns (positive condition) in a short-term recognition memory (STRM)…

A well established finding in the discrimination learning literature is that pictures are learned more rapidly than their associated verbal labels. It was hypothesized in this study that the usual superiority of pictures over words in a discrimination list containing same-instance repetitions would disappear in a discrimination list containing…

This study extended concepts derived from Rothkopf's mathemagenic hypothesis to problem solving. While previous mathemagenic research has established that adjunct questions interspersed with written prose facilitates learning, it has been criticized as educationally nonsignificant because the research has focused on verbatim learning. To test…

Evaluating a reader's ability to use language to derive meaning should be one of the major emphases of reading instruction. A technique which is used in miscue research to evaluate a reader's comprehension of written material is called the retelling. The reader's retelling of a story or passage provides information about his or her ability to…

This paper critically reviews selected studies in the area of reading comprehension, in order to characterize the differential patterns that skilled and unskilled comprehenders employ. The research reviewed is organized into three broad components: (1) decoding, (2) accessing the meaning of single printed words, and (3) text organization…

An explanation of the child's mind and his language, stated in terms of the nature of the learner, is presented in this book. The authors ask teachers to think about the competence of the child and try to discover what he must know to be able to read. They ask teachers to examine the nature of the learner--what he knows that enables him to learn…

Conceptualizations of the reading process and the nature of comprehension are discussed in relation to the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Beginning Reading Program. A method of syntactic analysis is proposed to help identify segments of meaning in reading materials. Components for comprehension assessment and instruction based on auch an…

Two stimuli of either small or capital letters were presented successively by tachistoscopic projectors. College students serving as subjects were requested to respond "yes" if the first stimulus (only one letter) was physically identical to or the same name of one of the letters in the second stimulus. The display size of the second stimulus was…