Two individual differences studies tested relationships between listening comprehension and two conceptualizations of working memory (WM) capacity. Recently, some theorists have stressed that the empirically indicated limits of rehearsal-based WM storage components are inconsistent with the amounts of information needed to accomplish complex…

To assess children's ability to draw inferences from selections of children's literature and to measure the significance of various selected factors to this ability was the problem of this study. Children (432) were evenly divided among grades 4, 5, and 6 and randomly divided at each grade level into two equal groups, one of which read the…

Investigated preschool children's understanding of temporal relationships in terms of their comprehension of sentences containing clauses linked by "before" and "after". Also evaluated was the relative importance of order of mention and main-subordinate relations strategies in children's interpretation of temporal order information. (Author/SDH)

Two experiments were conducted (1) to identify the component processes of language comprehension that draw upon cognitive capacity for their execution, and (2) to determine differences in patterns of resource allocation during integrative processing for good and poor readers. In the first experiment, nine good and nine poor college-age readers…

A study investigated the effects of induced mental imagery upon the comprehension of oral versus written discourse for above and below average readers. A secondary purpose of the study was to determine, through a follow-up interview, the students' ability to induce mental imagery. Sixty-three sixth grade students with above or below average…

The "individual forming meaning with a text" is a private and fundamental semiotic process involving relationships among text, individual, and meaning. Prior to an individual's use of language for aesthetic purposes lies the presupposition of the aesthetic language act--that the individual approaches the text expecting to work and be rewarded.…

Presents a reply to and an analysis of a study which examined the use of logograph research to determine children's cognitive integration ability. The study in question had been based on the present author's previous research. (BD)

Compares the effects of audio and audiovisual presentation on young children's cognitive processing while explicitly controlling the amount and complexity of information. (HOD)

Discusses issues raised during the course of a research project conducted to determine the place of comprehension activities in the teaching of English, including the question of whether the development of comprehension activities has any place in the teaching of English at the 12-grade level. (DF)

Provides a literature review of research done in recent years to identify comprehension processes within the reader. (TJ)

The main objective in the present study is to examine the effect of gender on primary school students' construction of elaborative backward inferences during text processing. A total of 333 children, aged 10-11 years (n = 158 girls and 175 boys) participated in the study. Each participant completed a backward inference test. The results indicate…

Intended to illuminate current understanding of how the reader's cognition and language and the text's structure affect the processing of prose, this volume contains articles written by educators, linguists, psychologists, and artificial intelligence experts on issues of comprehension research. The first part of the book examines reading…

More than 100 college students enrolled in a reading and study skills course participated in a study designed to show the effects of retrieval speed on adult reading comprehension. A microcomputer version of the Posner task was used to measure memory retrieval speed, and reading and listening comprehension were measured from McCall-Crabbs…

According to S. K. Langer, people create meaning through presentational and discursive symbolism. Presentational symbolism, Langer suggests, is an abstracted sense of experienced life, while discursive symbolism is a series of subordinating or coordinating positions that set in motion the relation of ideas and permits the discussion of causation.…