A study of the development of 6- to 12-year-old children's appreciation of verbal jokes was conducted within the framework of the incongruity and resolution theory of humor. Results revealed age differences indicating that older children appreciated both structural components while younger children appreciated the incongruity structure. (ST)

Biased and unbiased ambiguous sentences, paired with either an expected'' or unexpected'' second sentence, were presented to 80 Ss for judgments of compatibility. The results supported the conclusion that only one meaning was derived for both types of ambiguities during initial comprehension processing. (Author)

Reviews recent reading research and points out several implications for classroom reading teachers. Uses T. C. Standal's descriptive model of reading as a framework in which to present the research. (FL)

Emphasizes that, in order to comprehend, a reader must chunk the many words of a sentence into meaningful groups of words. Offers suggestions for developing "thought units" in the upper grades. (FL)

Discusses the generalizability of educational research and uses the area of main idea comprehension to illustrate how a line of research can be overgeneralized and lead to unfounded conclusions and pedagogical implications. (FL)

Provides suggestions for activating prior knowledge, getting children to be aware when their comprehension is lagging, and tying it all together at the end. (FL)

Outlines seven basic concepts regarding teachers' understanding of the comprehension process and proposes several instructional strategies based on the concepts, each of which actively involves children in reading. (FL)

Discusses the results of a study that examined the relationship between comprehension ability and prior knowledge in children's recall of structurally equivalent text. (AEA)

Discusses the principles of art and provides activities that correlate art and reading and promote cognitive and affective development. (HTH)

Finds that giving students background knowledge of a subject improved their performances on a test of reading comprehension. (AEA)

Subjects read passages taken from Bransford and Johnson's materials either with or without the context-inducing title provided. The presence of the title increased comprehension and recall but had no effect on recognition. Activation of relevant information already stored in memory may not be essential to the encoding process. (Author/RD)

Comprehension monitoring was investigated by asking college students to read and answer probed recall questions about passages that contained intentionally introduced confusions. Subjects failed to report a large number of the confusions and less than one quarter of the confusions were noticed during reading. (HOD)

Describes a story grammar, summarizes some results of story grammar research, and suggests instructional procedures for developing children's concept of story and story components. (FL)

Analysis of errors by more than 300 kindergarten children on the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts suggested seven cognitive factors that appear to be involved, including complexity of directions, deficits in spatial perception, and inadequate auditory memory for sentences. (CL)

Explores children's understanding of the nature of television characters by assessing their abilities to differentiate between human, animated, and puppet characters. (PD)