The four papers in this collection discuss language perception and comprehension and report on experiments in those areas. The first paper, "The Influence of Non-Linguistic Knowledge on Perceiving and Verifying Sentences," discusses the reliance of language perception and comprehension on the interaction of linguistic and world…

Two passages were written, one on the topic of graphs and one on the topic of sonnets. Sixteen versions of each passage were constructed. Each version contained identical content but different textual manipulations. One hundred twelve community college students and 48 Cornell students participated in the experiment. Each read a single version of…

This study attempted to discover the relative contribution to spelling achievement (the dependent variable) of each of the following independent variables: intelligence, visual memory, auditory memory, structural analysis, phonetic analysis, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. Participating in the study were 190 students from six seventh-grade…

The role of inference in children's comprehension and memory is the subject of this research report. An underlying proposition is that in order for a child to effectively understand and remember linguistic or nonlinguistic information, he must actively embellish the given stimulus material with his own implicit knowledge. In the experiment…

Two experiments were conducted, the purpose of which was to investigate the direct effects of questioning. In experiment one, 240 sophomores, juniors, and seniors from a small town high school read one of two versions of a 550-word passage describing the social behavior of the army ant. The subjects then took either a verbatim or paraphrase quiz,…

The purposes of this study were to replicate the effects of question placement, either before or after, on the acquisition of critical and incidental material with grade school subjects and to determine the effects of paragraph length on learning with children. Two variables, question placement (BA) and pacing (PL), were combined in a 2 x 4…

Explores how well measures of verbal short-term memory and naming speed tasks predict children's reading achievement under various IQ control conditions. Both were effective, but when controlling for verbal IQ, memory measures are less reliable, whereas digit-naming speed remains a significant predictor of reading achievement. (MM)

Two hypotheses (selective attention and slot filling) of how schemata enhance the learning and recall of the initial comprehension of prose material were tested. Consistent with the attention-focusing hypothesis, readers spent more time on sentences containing information important to their assigned perspective. (Author/PN)

The effectiveness of a measure of the processing capacity of working memory, called the reading span test, is demonstrated in predicting performance and understanding individual differences in reading comprehension. (Author/PN)

Reviewed theoretical and empirical work in phonological recoding, concluding that phonological representation is used to aid comprehension and suggesting that decoding graphemic information into a phonological form is important for early readers. Asserts that future research should examine differences in the use of visual versus phonological…

This article discusses various studies that deal with understanding written and oral discourse and demonstrates the implications of these studies for second language teaching. (CFM)

Uses preschool tests of general verbal ability, verbal memory span, phonological awareness, lexical access speed and accuracy, and letter knowledge in preschool as independent measures predicting performance on second-grade reading comprehension, word discrimination, and word decoding speed. Finds differential main effects and interactions but a…

Describes transactional strategies instruction, an approach to teaching reading comprehension in elementary classes that focuses on student and teacher transactions with text. Contends that the approach differs from traditional strategy instruction. Provides examples of transactional strategies instruction, including dialogs between teachers and…

Decoding, working memory, and domain-specific prior knowledge were studied as predictors of comprehension for 48 university undergraduate students after rewriting notes, rereading notes, or rereading a text. Working memory was most important for comprehension of text-implicit information, whereas knowledge was relatively more important for…

This study investigated the validity of 3 curriculum-based measures for predicting the performance of 184 secondary students (including 13 with mild disabilities) on content-area tasks. Reliable correlations were found between oral reading, maze, and vocabulary measures; and students' performance on comprehension, acquisition, and retention of…