Two experiments investigated the effects of preceding sentence context on the naming times of sentence completion words in third-grade children and college students. In the first study subjects were shown incomplete sentences with four types of target words: best completions; semantically and syntactically appropriate, but less likely completions;…

A summer institute trained 18 teachers to identify and plan curriculum for gifted minority and disadvantaged young children from culturally different and remote rural areas. Theory and practicum emphases were included in the program. Teachers were trained in the Structure of the Intellect (SOI) model. Sixty-eight children from the Alpine (Texas)…

This book, intended for researchers in the psychology of reading and language, college students in psychology and education, teachers of reading, and educators in general, is designed to be used in a course on the psychology of reading or the psychology of language comprehension. The book contains the following chapters: (1) "An Introduction and…

Recognizing a word in a meaningful text involves processes that combine information from many different sources, and both bottom-up processes (such as feature extraction and letter recognition) and top-down processes (contextual information) are thought to interact when skilled readers recognize words. Two similar experiments investigated word…

Research on adult readers' word recognition skills is used in this paper to develop a general information processing model of reading. Stages of the model include feature extraction, interpretation, lexical access, working memory, and integration. Of those stages, particular attention is given to the units of interpretation, speech recoding and…

The papers in this volume were initially presented at a seminar on the development of reading comprehension, which explored basic research and the teaching of reading comprehenison. Researchers in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics and experts in curriculum design in reading gave presentations and reacted to one another's ideas. Each…

A model of cognitive operations that children use in reading and comprehending a sentence was tested by using Sternberg's independent-process analysis on 64 second and fifth graders who were either high- or low-ability readers. Three specific component processes were examined: a decoding process, a word meaning process, and a comprehension…

The work described in this paper was undertaken to study children's ability to preserve semantic relations during analogical mappings. Two experiments are described based on the understanding that metaphors and analogies are mappings from one semantic region (the domain of origin) to another (the range of application), which convey the idea that…

The problem of this conference panel was to determine the interaction between the structural properties of text and the cognitive processes involved in comprehension. This panel report contains sections on the organization of the message in the communication system, the information readers derive from a message and how well they derive it, the…

The paper discusses some of the "belief systems knowledge" used in language understanding. It begins with a presentation of a theory of personal causation. The theory supplies the tools to account for purposeful behavior. Using primitives of the theory, the social aspect of an action can be described. The social aspect is that which depends on…

This text is designed for students of English as a second language for intermediate and advanced levels of proficiency. The text is based on an approach to writing which is semantic and cognitive. Providing for active transfer of each student's knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, it bridges the gap between controlled writing and free writing.…

The experiment described in this report investigates the effects of various cognitive cues in questions asked regarding the relationship of elements in pictorial depth perception. The subjects of this study are 40 third grade Black and Puerto Rican children. They are confronted with four pictures from the Hudson Depth Perception Tests and asked to…

Discusses analogical change in word structure where meaning seems to have had a role in determining the direction of the change. Many examples are given of pairs of British place names and other English words of various origins. A few examples are included from other languages. (Author/LMO)

These experiments focus upon two assumptions of the levels of processing formulation: that context provides exclusive control over the qualitative nature of encoding, and that amount recalled is determined both by cue-trace compatibility and by depth. The results cast doubt upon the validity of each assumption. (Author/MH)

Judgements about the acceptability of anomalous and non-anomalous sentences were elicted from children between the ages of 2;0 and 5;0. The aim was to see how the children's direct experience might affect their recognition of semantic constraints, and how far their experience would generalize. (Author)