A study using a biasing paradigm examined four hypotheses regarding specific mechanisms thought to underlie the Assimilation-plus-Correction (A-C) theory of schema-text interactions. According to this theory, the ideas implied by a schema (type-1 ideas) are thought to be assimilated and obscured, while those ideas representing novel information…

Two views of the sources of poor reading comprehension are currently distinguishable in the research literature: a decoding sufficiency view and a comprehension skills view. The decoding sufficiency view argues that decoding is the only skill that must be acquired for general language comprehension. The broader, comprehension skills hypothesis…

This final report on the relationship between orthographic characteristics and reading behavior consists of five chapters. The first chapter examines writing in its variety of forms in different cultures, noting that such differences can provide important clues to how the brain processes visual information. The second chapter addresses the issue…

Thirty-six college students read a portion of a contemporary novel presented on a cathode ray tube while their eye movements were being monitored and recorded in an effort to determine how soon after the onset of a fixation during reading the mind begins to deal with characteristics of the language being perceived. The passage contained a total of…

In order to investigate the effect of experimenter-controlled reading speeds on the literal comprehension of multilevel reading passages and to assess the effects of operant-regulated, or self-regulated, conditions on reading speed, these two studies sampled a total of 400 eighth graders. Two passages, originally written at the eighth-grade level,…

Separate listings of both ongoing and completed reading research in Great Britain between 1974 and 1977--including relevant language studies and research on spelling--are arranged alphabetically by researcher, reporting the research title, the institution at which the research was conducted, the years started and completed, and the type of…

This study discusses the importance of comprehension in reading and describes a tool for measuring reading comprehension according to an individual reader's "structures of meaning." The procedure for developing a visual representation of this structure involves three distinct steps. After reading the text, student and teacher employ techniques,…

Two experiments examined proofreading errors to test whether reading is mediated by a phonological recoding stage. In the first experiment, 162 undergraduates circled the misspelled words in a text as the experimenter read the passage aloud. In the second experiment, 165 undergraduates corrected misspellings as they read the same passage silently,…

This study examined the value of the Read-Encode-Annotate-Ponder (REAP) procedure as a teaching/learning strategy, focusing on its use of written annotations designed to achieve specific learning objectives. Subjects were 105 students in six college reading/study skills classes who were assigned to one of three treatment conditions: the…

This study develops an information model based on the processes involved in reading and listening as a step toward constructing a single framework for understanding both these skills. Assuming that analogous structures and processes occur in reading and listening, similar experimental questions are asked in both areas. The model incorporates data…

An examination and evaluation of the papers presented at the Pittsburgh conference on the theory and practice of beginning reading instruction shows that there is little interaction between basic research in reading and applied work on reading instruction. Classroom instruction relies more on intuition and experience than on laboratory research,…

Greater understanding of reading can come about only after more basic reading research has been accomplished. Basic research should focus on what constitutes good reading, which means that the type of research that will identify characteristics of good reading must be a detailed assessment of variable effects on reading behaviors (not whether…

This dissertation presents a systematic review of literature published from 1861-1974 and available in English which deals with children who may be classified as learning disabled by current federal law. The purposes of the review were to trace the studies of behaviors related to learning disabilities, to identify key studies on which later…

Recent developments in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence have shown that various types of prior knowledge play important roles in understanding during text processing and have resulted in a new kind of model for conceptual processing, "procedural semantics." This paper discusses two types of units, or schemata, which,…