A taxonomy developed for the study of the growth and development of written language from the perspective of social event was tested with a group of 68 children, aged three to six years. The subjects were presented with a wide variety of environmental print messages (road signs, toys, fast food signs, and household products) and were questioned…

Three questions are addressed in this study: (1) what is the effect of additional, unexplained content on achievement and perception? (2) is the effect altered by time? and, (3) what is the relation between student achievement and student perception? It was determined that the effect on achievement was not significant but the effect on perception…

The use of cognitively oriented models in research in reading comprehension requires the examination of the task demand characteristics of the research. Those cognitive processes involved in the performance which are due to the experimental procedures must be separated from those which operate in normal circumstances. "Control…

This study is a preliminary investigation of the relationship between measures of individual differences in perception and the way word components fuse when words such as "lanket" and "banket," both derived from "blanket," are presented one to each ear. Thirty-six native speakers of English participated in the experiment, receiving four dollars…

The material in this monograph is based on the idea that science content and the reading and reasoning processes for learning may be taught simultaneously in the science classroom. Topics of the six chapters are: distinguishing between content and process, developmental and functional reading; diagnosis in teaching science; preparatory activities…

The major purposes of this study were to determine the effect of a specific cognitive organizer, the Structured Overview (SO), on reading comprehension and to assess the effect of accompanying the overview with a set of directions for its use. One hundred twenty-four undergraduate members of a developmental reading course were randomly assigned to…

This study was designed to assess whether negative transfer in children's paired-associate learning could be reduced by changing the levels of meaning at which stimuli were encoded on the two lists. It was hypothesized that changes in meaning levels from a first to a second list would result in less interference than conditions where stimuli…

The major purpose of this study was to provide insights into some of the reasoning strategies that may be used by students in obtaining meaning from the printed page. The study was designed to collect and analyze the verbal protocols of 11 seventh grade students involved in introspection as they responded to standardized measures of reading…

The effects of imagery instructions, word arousal value, and retention interval on children's literal and inferential comprehension of text was studied using 459 grade 3, 4 and 5 students. Imagery instructions significantly facilitated inferential comprehension on the short-term retention test but this effect disappeared a week later. On the other…

The purpose of these studies was to test the hypothesis that thematization affects the probability that a probe word will produce meaning-preserving recall of a sentence that is part of a discourse. Sentences were constructed along the lines of subject-verb-object and were presented in three experiments: free recall of isolated sentences, prompted…

Knowing how to read is a very important aid in accelerating mental activity and curiosity in children and thus opening up new regions of thought and experience--one of the broad goals of education. However, reading should not be defined solely in relation to print media. Other languages, such as film, can enrich the study of all humanities…

This paper discusses two aspects of reading as a cognitive process as they relate to instruction based on the intellectual operation performed during the act of reading. The first consideration is an assumption that comprehension skills are based on a set of underlying cognitive tasks or operations which can be developed through instruction. The…

This study is an attempt to identify one source of individual differences in the extent to which readers learn from text and the means for accommodating it. Eighty college students were administered a series of aptitude tests and randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups. The subjects then received six passages, each passage followed by a…

The preliterate child must acquire from reading instruction at least the following skills: (a) appropriate scanning behavior, (b) letter and word recognition, (c) letter-sound generalizations, and (d) comprehension of written materials, at least to the degree that the reader can comprehend the same message when received aurally. Almost all modern…

The two studies outlined in this report gauged college undergraduates' ability to learn and to recall the content of certain passages when provided with "directed perspectives" or context clues. In the first study, 63 subjects were divided into three groups, were asked to read two stories, and were assigned a perspective (home buyer,…