This paper investigates the intentional creation of ambiguity by composers of cryptic crossword puzzles. Taking a research question of "what makes a cryptic clue more difficult to solve than a simple crossword clue," it compares a sample of cryptic and quick crosswords from "The Guardian" and attempts to isolate the linguistic…

Reading comprehension is an important skill that every student needs in order to be successful. It is directly influenced by how readers construct a representation of the information that they are taking in. Overwhelmingly, the processing strategies found in research can appropriately fit into the Into, Through, Beyond strategies used in the…

A study examined adult low-literate readers' knowledge of their cognitive skills. By better knowing this clientele from both the cognitive and metacognitive angles, several objectives could be met, including remedying a lack of knowledge in their assessment, and building a valid curriculum content closer to their needs. Many studies suggest that a…

This paper evaluates widely used, standardized tests of reading within the framework of four interdependent reading components: (1) decoding speed and accuracy; (2) accuracy, fluency, and flexibility of determining semantic meaning of words; (3) sentence comprehension; and (4) passage dependent sentence comprehension. Among the types of…

Observation has suggested that different subgroups of precocious readers might be distinguished by different patterns of strengths and weaknesses. In particular, it seems that one group of children might be distinguished by the strength of their top-down, conceptually driven processes and another by their strong bottom-up, text driven processes.…

A study examined the importance of two phonological encoding procedures (addressed phonology and assembled phonology) in children who are learning to read and how the relative importance of these two procedures might change over the age range from six to eight. Subjects, 72 fifth, fourth, and third grade students from two inner London (England)…

Drawing on a previous project carried out in Sweden, the "Prevention of Reading Difficulties" project was implemented in the Netherlands between 1978 and 1985. The project encompassed three stages: (1) a longitudinal investigation to establish the possiblity of predicting reading achievement before formal reading instruction starts; (2)…

Designed to appeal to students who want a short but up-to-date overview, researchers who are interested in a critical appraisal, and consumers who would like to know what leaders in the field think, this collection of articles highlights the changes that have occurred in readability research from the past to the present and makes predictions about…

A study examined whether illustrations that must be attended to in order to make sense of a text hinder decoding by encouraging dependence on such illustrations for interpretation of text, both for decoding and for answering questions. Subjects--167 first graders--were asked to read four stories, two of which were taken from basal readers and two…

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…

To determine whether increasing decoding speed affects the comprehension of poor readers, two experiments were designed to test two groups consisting of seven good readers and eleven poor readers chosen from fourth and fifth grade. In the first experiment, poor readers were trained to read a list of words as rapidly as the good readers and were…

The reading responses of 80 second grade students to words in context and words in isolation were analyzed. The children were tested individually with four oral reading selections (kindergarten through third grade levels), a set of comprehension questions, and a word list. The children recognized fewer words in isolation than in context. The…

This investigation describes a field test of the materials entitled "Reading: An Educational Approach to Disability" (READ), which were developed to aid disabled readers in the beginning stages of learning to decode English print. The subjects were 15 Title I reading teachers working in small groups with 183 second-grade children. The…

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…