This paper advocates the view of readability as an interaction between text structure and the cognitive processes and structures possessed by a reader. A simulation model of prose comprehension that yields predictions of both propositional recall and text readability based on the frequencies of different processing events is discussed. The paper…

This report discusses research and theory that explore relationships between comprehension and knowledge acquisition. Studies are reported that indicate the lack of a one-to-one correspondence between initial comprehension activities and abilities to remember. It is noted that the value of comprehensive activities depends on how people must later…

Reading comprehension includes both how much a reader remembers and how well the reader understands what has been read. It is dependent upon processing meaning. A model for how this is done includes three steps: identifying important elements of the text, constructing representations of important text information, and matching the representations…

To conceptualize a reader's comprehension of text as a semantic and interpretive processing of information, it is necessary to take note of interactions among persons and texts and conditions under which the texts are to be comprehended. A Computer-Assisted Language Analysis System (CALAS) was constructed which focuses on the text as any…

Three experiments were conducted to determine how children assign meaning to a multiple-meaning word in a sentence context. Fourth-grade children were given sentences in which a key word carried a meaning other than its "primary," or most familiar, meaning. Two types of multiple choice questions could then follow: in the first type, the secondary,…

Studies investigating selected aspects of children's television viewing are described and the findings are used as the basis of a theoretical formulation in which young children's television viewing is seen as a transactional process similar to other normal information processing activities. According to this formulation, the child's motivation to…

Rigorously articulated conversational studies (based on George Kelly's personal construct theory) of the reading of complete texts raise new questions about the cognitive processes by which meaning is attributed to the printed word. Four generative models are examined: probabilistic, phrase structure, transformational, and semantic. No single…

This study of the reading process was written by a librarian for other librarians in order to explore what happens as the end result of the librarian's job, the meeting of a person and a book. A model of the reading act is constructed which makes the reader the subject rather than the receiver, as in the communications model of "transmitter…

Native English speakers performed a phoneme-monitoring task to assess whether ambiguous words (homographs) require extra processing capacity under two conditions: no prior context and prior context provided by disambiguating subject-noun and verb combinations. Phoneme detection latencies were reliably longer for homographs than for control words…

Six experiments were reported which examine the young child's ability to compare included and nonincluded sets. Subjects were children from nursery and primary schools in Edinburgh. (Author/MP)

Subjects named pictures on which words or nonwords were superimposed as distractors in this study designed to test whether the meaning of printed words is perceived directly or by means of phonetic recoding. (HOD)

School age children and adults read short paragraphs suggesting spatial relationships and were given a recognition test containing items congruent with the semantic content of the test. Subjects recognized the semantically congruent inferences as having been present in the original reading material. (AA)

Four types of semantic relation, assumed by different researchers to be implicated in the organization of semantic information, were investigated by means of false recognition and word association tasks presented to independent samples of 4- and 5-year-old children. (Author/SB)

Concludes that linguistic and visual-linguistic training sessions do not increase children's ability to comprehend reversible passive sentences. (MH)

Discusses study which supported the Piagetian theory concerning the cognitive functioning of the concrete operational child. (JM)