Suggests ways of creating simple or complex seeing-thinking activities which develop students' predictive behaviors. (DD)

A semantic priming procedure was employed to test the hypothesis that children differing in word-decoding skill differentially use context to facilitate word identification. (Author/DB)

The effects of contextual words upon the identification of test words in sentences were studied with 21 hearing impaired children (seven to 12 years old). Significantly more correct discriminations were made on congruous and neutral sentences than on incongruous sentences indicating that hearing impaired children use contextual cues. (Author/SEW)

Reading disabled adolescents with specific learning disabilities were compared to normal adolescent readers and young normal readers (total N=48). Results showed that context facilitated both decoding and meaning recognition for normal readers, and reading disabled adolescents showed deficits on both tasks. (Author/CL)

A study shows that word shape information, when combined with knowledge of the syntactic and semantic structure of the passage being read, more often than not specifies unique words among all of the alternative high frequency words of English. (MKM)

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that, when interpreted in context, general terms are typically encoded on the basis of an instantiation. Results indicated that a particular term naming the expected instantiation of a general term was a better cue for recall of a sentence than the general term itself. (CHK)

This study with 32 primary school children (ages 6 and 8) confirms that children read words better in context but concludes that the use of context as a routine way of compensating for poor decoding skills may lead to future reading difficulties. (DB)

Presents a structural approach to word pronunciation consisting of six guides that do not require distorting a word's appearance in any way. (TO)

Listeners shadowed lists of words or parts of sentences, and shadowing latencies were recorded. The effect of attended context was interpreted as a result of strategical manipulation of response bias (a resource-limited process), whereas unattended context may be effective through spreading excitation in semantic memory (a data-limited process).…

Three passages that differed in accessibility but not linguistic difficulty were read by 52 11-year-old remedial readers, focusing on words read correctly. Readers were able to use linguistic cues to solve difficult words. Context dependency was affected both by decoding ability and text accessibility. (SK)

Investigates context effects for words with more than one meaning. Finds that younger children (third graders) were more sensitive to the sentence context in which an ambiguous word appears, whereas the processing of older children (sixth graders) was determined more by the relative frequencies of the word meanings. (RS)

The aim of this study was to determine whether a general or specific context facilitation mechanism should be incorporated into information-processing models of reading. General facilitation models claim that a context can facilitate recognition of any word that is related to it. Specific facilitation models claim that a context will facilitate…

Study investigated incidental learning of word meanings from context during normal reading. Effects of word and text properties were examined in detail. Small but reliable gains in knowledge were found at all grade levels and ability levels tested. (RB)

Proposes a theory to explain why writing and reading contribute to growth in each other--both are compositional in nature or require the reader/writer to arrange responses to form a coherent whole. (AEA)