Examined six- and eight-year-old children's use of contextual expectations to detect inconsistencies in story information and their ability to discriminate between information that resolved or was irrelevant to these inconsistencies. Results showed that six-year-olds frequently detected inconsistent events but that they failed to discriminate…

Tested competing hypotheses about the acquisition of terms that refer to relationships in both time and space. Hypotheses were as follows: (1) language of time is acquired as a spatial metaphor; and (2) differential experience with the dual senses of each term results in different acquisition patterns depending upon which sense dominates actual…

Implies that instruction can help students improve in reader-based processing of text and that strategies for making schema-general questions story-specific are necessary for processing, storing, and retrieving information from complex short stories. (AEA)

By understanding factors that can make reading difficult for students who are normally able readers, content teachers can facilitate comprehension in their classes. (AEA)

Illustrates and compares skills and process orientations for reading instruction. Tips for teachers of reading are provided. (RH)

Reading ability is a combination of four major skills (word identification, vocabulary, comprehension, study skills), internal influences (experiences, interests, language and cognitive abilities, health goals), and external influences (material complexity, reading environment). Teachers can enhance their students' reading capability by…

This study investigated why children reproduce and/or reconstruct text in a classroom. The focus was on social classroom variables. Results supported the prediction that students would recall text differentially according to the response interaction pattern maintained with teachers. (Author/DB)

Notes that readers do not depend solely on the visual aspects of reading, but also make use of nonvisual understanding in decoding print. Among the nonvisual components of reading discussed are desiring knowledge, understanding the nature and purpose of reading, reading for meaning, and predicting an author's message. (MKM)

Investigated (1) whether young children can extract a story's main idea, (2) how much they can recall from stories, (3) whether their recall is related to the main theme, (4) whether recall occurs in logical sequence, and (5) from which part of a story more ideas are remembered. (Author/DB)

Two experiments examined the nature of access, storage, and comprehension of idiomatic phrases, using a phrase classification task. Results support a lexical representation hypothesis for the processing of idioms. (Author/AM)

Reaction time to reading sentences which were not clearly interrelated was longer when a paragraph was titled to give it to more discourse (paragraph) level meaning. The presence of titles had no effect on reaction times for meaningful paragraphs, however. (CP)

Details an investigation into the relationships between reading attitude, reading comprehension, and mental imagery. Concludes that there are significant correlations between reading attitude and mental imagery and between reading comprehension and reading attitude, but that there is no significant relationship between reading comprehension and…

Discusses cognitive style (the degree to which perception is influenced by environmental variables) and cognitive control (which focuses on the regulation of perception by the ego). Concepts addressed include field dependence-independence, field articulation, conceptual style, cognitive tempo, intrusive information, focal attention, and…

Examines evidence supporting the view that speech recoding is necessary prior to lexical access, explores an alternative view (that speech recoding occurs in working memory), describes an experiment suggesting that meaning analyses during reading can occur without speech recoding in working memory, and discusses models of reading. (GT)

Correct speech usage and good reading skills are the most important tools an individual can ever acquire. Every child deserves a chance to gain them through thoughtful, expert teaching. (Author)