Sixty of the possible beginning phonemes of English monosyllables were paired with the vowel /a/ in nonsense syllables, and used in illustrative one-syllable words. The sixty manners of commencing words had been scaled in terms of their relative perceptual similarity-dissimilarity in sounds. Both syllables and words were divided into three levels…

Noting that current cognitive theories focus on the belief that knowledge is an organized collection of long-term structures upon which various processing mechanisms operate, this paper argues that mental functioning may be more readily characterized if the idea of abstract long-term associations and structures is abandoned. It proposes a model of…

Research into the reading process has shaped an understanding of how readers "make meaning" when they are engaged in a reading activity. This research has highlighted a learning triad--the reader, the text, and the context (or learning environment)--that interactively affects the manner in which the student will comprehend a particular…

Defining metaphor as "seeing a concept from one class in terms of a concept from another class," a study was devised that analyzed the degree to which two concepts occupy dissimilar positions with respect to their category or domain (within-domain distance), and the degree to which categories themselves are dissimilar (between-domain distance).…

To develop a coherent description of the knowledge and processes involved in skillful word recognition, a study was devised in which 16 adults participated in four related experiments. The purpose of the first experiment was to examine some basic aspects of the processing of words, pseudowords, and nonwords and to discover basic differences in…

The review summarizes empirical findings and theoretical views related to the Stroop color-word phenomenon, in which naming of a color is disrupted and delayed by the presence of an "irrelevant" word denoting a color different from the color patch. It was deemed important to increase awareness of this phenomenon, since it involves basic…

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,…

This study examined the interrelationships among a number of episodic memory tasks and among various attributes of memory. A sample of 200 college students was tested for ten sessions; 28 different measures of episodic memory were obtained. In addition, five measures of semantic memory were available. Results indicated that episodic and semantic…

Two experiments were conducted to determine the features of text to which skilled adult readers need to attend while reading and the features that either are of minimal importance or can be processed automatically without directed processing. In the first experiment, 12 college students attended to a timed picture naming task, in which a picture…

The focus of this experiment was on the effects of associative strength on retention of connected discourse, in terms of both single words and strings of words. Also of interest was the short- and long-term retention of two types of information, verbatim and substance. Verbatim information covered words and word sequences identical to those in the…

The effectiveness of two types of retrieval cues was assessed with second- and sixth-grade children. After a single presentation of a list of words, the children first recalled as many of the words as they could. Following free recall, children in each grade were given either conceptual (category names for words on the input lists) or acoustic…

A model was developed to account for similarities and differences between picture and word processing in a variety of semantic and episodic memory tasks. The model contains three levels of processing: low-level processing of the physical characteristics of externally presented pictures and words; an intermediate level where the low-level processor…

Two experiments investigated the effects of preceding sentence context on the naming times of sentence completion words in third-grade children and college students. In the first study subjects were shown incomplete sentences with four types of target words: best completions; semantically and syntactically appropriate, but less likely completions;…

To ascertain whether paradigmatic performance on a word association test administered at the end of kindergarten is an effective predictor of reading achievement, 37 children were tested on the Syntagmatic-Paradigmatic Assessment (SPA) at the end of their kindergarten year. At the end of their first grade year, the children were administered a…

THE RELATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF INDUCTIVE AND DEDUCTIVE APPROACHES TO THE INSTRUCTION OF WORD ANALYSIS TASKS WAS STUDIED. A NUMBER OF PHONIC AND STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS GENERALIZATIONS, APPLIED TO THE PRONUNCIATION OF WORDS ABOVE THE PRIMARY LEVEL IN DIFFICULTY, WERE PRESENTED TO EIGHTH- AND NINTH-GRADERS OF AVERAGE MENTAL ABILITY BUT WHO WERE WEAK IN…