Twenty female and 20 male college students studied a passage in quiet surroundings or while listening to preferred music and then either relaxed or read unrelated material. Reading comprehension of the passage was facilitated by silent study for subjects who seldom listen to music and by poststudy relaxation. (Author)

Argues that, although Piaget's seminal work on children's use of intention and consequence information to make moral evaluations has spawned a substantial amount of research, progress in this area has been hampered by serious conceptual and methodological problems. Offers some methodological guidelines for conducting research in this area.…

Third- and fifth-grade children's abilities to make inferences in the context of reading and understanding a lengthy story were examined. The most critical result was that the younger, but not the older children, made fewer inferences when the component premises for an inference were located in separate paragraphs than when they occurred in the…

Summarizes the findings of Perry Thorndyke's investigation of knowledge acquisition from newspaper stories. (DD)

In a study focusing on components of metacognition, 12 expert and 12 novice computer programmers were compared in terms of metacognitive knowledge and task-specific awareness. Results indicate that experts have a close interaction between metacognitive knowledge, task-specific awareness, and cognitive monitoring that is missing in novices. (SLD)

Investigates the effect of depth of processing on second-language reading comprehension. Finds that questions which entailed shallow cognitive processing (factual ones) are easier to answer than those which entail deeper cognitive processing (generalization and inference questions). (SR)

Examines the role of vocal cues in children's cognitive representations of texts. Finds that, in general, vocal cues influenced the speed and likelihood of constructing inferences but that cues failed to enhance memory for explicit text concepts. Discusses developing a model specifying the relationship between vocal cues and text understanding.…

The notion that inferences contributing to coherence of a text representation are made during reading is examined. It is demonstrated that this idea is an overgeneralization and that one must distinguish between relations internal to the structure of the representation and relations that involve references to the world. (27 references) (Author/LB)

The general monitoring skill hypothesis states that skilled adult learners monitor their comprehension using domain-general metacognitive knowledge and domain-specific knowledge. Results with 192 undergraduates indicate that monitoring skills are correlated across multiple domains and that individuals may possess separate monitoring skills for…

States that although the think-aloud method (TAM) is being used with increasing frequency in studying text comprehension, some skepticism of its value remains. Discusses assumptions behind TAM, aspects of comprehension it can reveal, and directions for research using TAM. Argues that TAM is a useful technique for tracking changes in the contents…

The literature on assessing the cognitive processes involved in hypertext comprehension during the past 15 years has yielded contradictory results. In this article we explore a possible factor affecting this situation, mainly the fact that previous works did not control for the potential effects on comprehension of reading strategies in hypertext.…

Relation priming is a phenomenon in which comprehension of a word pair (e.g., COPPER HORSE) is facilitated by the prior presentation of another word pair (e.g., GLASS EYE) that instantiates the same conceptual relation (i.e., "composed of"). We investigated whether relation priming is contingent on lexical similarity. Study 1 revealed that…

The aim of this research is to devise a cognitive tool for meeting the diverse needs of learners for comprehending new procedural knowledge. A model of affordances on teaching fraction equivalence for developing procedural knowledge for adding/subtracting fractions with unlike denominators was derived from the results of a case study of an initial…

Memory-based and constructionist processes have both been proposed as essential components of the activation of concepts (e.g., propositions) and the establishment of meaningful connections between concepts during reading. In this article, we argue that a comprehensive theory of reading comprehension should include both sets of processes. In…

In this article, we discuss 2 issues that we believe any theory of discourse comprehension has to take account of-accessing irrelevant information and granularity. Along the lines that have been suggested as demonstrating the memory-based account, we describe some work in favor of the recruitment of apparently irrelevant information from memory…