This research sought to add to a body of knowledge that is severely underrepresented in the scientific literature, reading comprehension in secondary students. Chapter 1 examines the current state of literacy in the nation's public schools and the consequences that arise if students leave high school with inadequate reading skills. It discusses…

Background: Pragmatic language impairment in children with specific language impairment has proved difficult to assess, and the nature of their abilities to comprehend pragmatic meaning has not been fully investigated. Aims: To develop both a cognitive approach to pragmatic language assessment based on Relevance Theory and an assessment tool for…

This study describes the development of social reasoning in school-age children. An irony task is used to assess 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds' (N = 72) and adults' (N = 24) recursive understanding of others' minds. Guttman scale analysis demonstrates that in order to understand a speaker's communicative intention, a child needs to recognize the…

Three experiments used "rhyme priming," a methodology in which lexical decisions to a visually presented word are facilitated when the word is preceded by a rhyming word, to investigate the access and maintenance of speech-based codes in sentence comprehension. In these experiments, the pairs were visually dissimilar rhymes, such as…

Thirty-six fourth grade pupils were grouped according to reading ability in a study conducted to examine comprehension within the framework of event perception. The children were presented a sequential activity described in picture or text form and then were asked to indicate on scoring sheets which of eight test items logically fit with the event…

Recent developments in cognitive science are assessed as challenge to well established view in philosophy of linguistics that meaning is inherent to language and is relatively fixed. Information provided by words and sentences, language comprehension, constructions of interpretations (not meanings), and arguments against relativism are discussed.…

Emerging research supports the contribution of executive function (EF) to reading comprehension; however, a unique pattern has not been established for children who demonstrate comprehension difficulties despite average word recognition ability (specific reading comprehension deficit; S-RCD). To identify particular EF components on which children…

The present study explores the impact of an experimental reading intervention focusing on explicit reading strategy instruction and cross-age peer tutoring on third and sixth graders' reading strategy awareness, cognitive and metacognitive reading strategy use, and reading comprehension achievement. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design was…

This article explains a viable, researched, teaching activity that I call Treasure Hunt. Treasure Hunt is an oral participation, vocabulary lesson that facilitates the transfer of reading comprehension to silent reading. I designed and used this activity with adolescent, challenged readers. The readers had scored below the 70th percentile on a…

In this article we present results of a Differential Item Functioning (DIF) study using Shealy and Stout's (1993) multidimensionality-based DIF analysis framework. In this framework, differences in test score distributions across different groups of examinees may be a result of multidimensionality if secondary dimensions (not the primary dimension…

This study investigates the relationship between oral proficiency and reading proficiency in English-learning children (L2 students) and native English-speaking children (NE students). A set of oral activities measuring students' academic oral skills in science classes was developed and administered to 61 fourth graders. Both the meaning-related…

Elementary school children's understanding was assessed after they read or listened to brief texts that described a scene, explained a sequence of events, or told a story. Results indicated that effectiveness in understanding depends on the fluency with which component processes of perceptual recognition, comprehension, and memory are coordinated.…

Reader-response criticism may elucidate the relationship between reading and knowing. Unfortunately, discussions of stylistics and convention in anthologies of reader response criticism tend to focus on fairly specialized literary problems. David Bleich's subjective paradigm provides a framework through which the study of both response and…

Noting the differences in processing information by reading and by listening, two studies examined subjects' ability to detect errors in written and oral prose. In both experiments, college students were presented with four expository passages drawn from different written sources. All passages were approximately 300 words and 5 paragraphs long,…

This paper provides a general description of schema-theoretic models of language comprehension and examines some extensions of such models to the study of reading. The goal of schema theory is to specify the interface between the reader and the text: to specify how the reader's knowledge interacts with and shapes the information on the page and to…