Children's expectations regarding the roles played in society by different groups of people have been shown to significantly affect their comprehension of sentences. This paper reports on a study designed to examine the way children's expectations affect the strategies they employ in two tasks tapping the organization of the semantic system. Sixty…

Compressed speech tapes--recordings of a voice reading a selection at the normal rate of approximately 150 words per minute that are speeded up to as much as 400 words a minute--can be used successfully with students to provide practice in improving reading rate and comprehension. In a field test conducted with 23 high school juniors and seniors…

This paper reports the outcomes of a correlational study that examined the relationships between visual and auditory perceptual skills, on the one hand, and comprehension that is independent of decoding, on the other. Five sets of test scores--a visual perceptual test (Coloured Progressive Matrices), an auditory perceptual test (Auditory Motor…

This study was designed to discover the answers to two general questions concerning the instrucitonal level of reading: (1) What is the percentage of word recognition that is necessary for second and fifth graders to maintain in order to achieve a certain percentage of comprehension? (2) Are those word recognition percentages the same for both…

This study was designed to test the effects of choice on the reading comprehension of 92 fifth and sixth grade students. Conducted in an elementary classroom, the test involved having each student read five cloze passages and answer an interest questionnaire about the passages. The experimental variable in this study was choice of topics on a…

A 30 hour remedial reading workshop, designed for all secondary language arts teachers and for selected secondary teachers in all subject areas, is described in this report. The workshop was designed for teachers in the Pamlico County (North Carolina) Schools by members of that school system and the General Assistance Center at East Carolina…

This study questions the developmental nature of the ability to understand syntactic structures. An exploration is made of the possibility of learning more about reading comprehension and readability by examining responses made to sentences described by transformational grammarians as structurally ambiguous. A group of fifth grade students were…

Two passages were written, one on the topic of graphs and one on the topic of sonnets. Sixteen versions of each passage were constructed. Each version contained identical content but different textual manipulations. One hundred twelve community college students and 48 Cornell students participated in the experiment. Each read a single version of…

In order to determine the opinions of third grade remedial reading pupils about trade books recommended in library selection aids and special series books recommended for poor readers, 57 pupils completed statements on book inventory forms about 24 picture books and 24 series books. Data was gathered on book completion, interest, and difficulty…

The hypothesized relationship between an individual's age, educational background, and ability to understand aspects of semantic ambiguity was investigated in this study. The 90 subjects included ten students in each of grades two, four, six, eight, and ten, as well as ten college undergraduates, ten graduate students, ten high school graduates,…

This report summarizes the development and validation of a test of literal comprehension based on a modified cloze technique. This modification of the cloze offers an objective and partially computerized procedure for constructing items in the multiple-choice format. A field test of the multiple-choice cloze (MCC) involved the administration of 36…

Previous research used a picture-word interference task to show that skilled and less skilled comprehenders in the third and fifth grades could retrieve the meaning of primer-level words equally well. With a similar task and comparable groups of children this study assessed the relationship between word difficulty and semantic access by using both…

The lack of reading instruction for seventh and eighth graders is detrimental to their academic development at a most crucial educational period. This study presents both theory and data which substantiate the need for including reading as a specific curriculum element in the middle school. Middle school organizational plans are outlined and…

In this investigation, the differences in psycholinguistic processing of written and spoken language and the psycholinguistic deficiencies of poor readers were studied by giving meaningful, anomalous, and random word strings to 18 good readers and 18 poor readers who were reading at the fourth grade level. It was found that in both spoken and…

From a total enrollment of 440 students in business communication classes, 270 voluntarily participated in a study of the relationship between the placement of performance objectives and reading comprehension. Students were tested for reading comprehension and were randomly assigned to one of two experiments and to pre-, post-, or no-objective…