A study investigated how two text-based factors, word relationships and surface syntactic structure, interact with readers' ability to analyze the semantic relationships and make inferences based on those analyses. In each passage, the influence of word relationships was assessed by manipulating the degree of semantic entailment between two words…

A pilot study of discourse in a practicum reading class for instruction in English as a second language examines miscommunication between non-native English speakers. Teachers and their students read transcripts of episodes from classroom discussions and wrote line-by-line analyses of what they understood was being said. Similarities and…

A study measured the connotations of selected health education related journals to their professional readers. The subjects were 250 randomly selected, college-affiliated health educators listed in "A National Directory of College and University Health Education Programs and Facilities 1981." Journals evaluated included: (1) "American College…

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…

A discussion of passives in the context of generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG) looks at two problems associated with a lexical rule that derives passive participles from active verbs. The first occurs with sentences whose main verb takes an NP and does not have a passive counterpart. This situation requires a more restrictive metarule, and…

The functions of blocking text with horizontal rules and providing headings of different types are discussed. Headings may be encoded or function as access structures, while blocking segments text and provides retrieval cues. These issues were tested in two experiments. College students read a 2000-word passage. In the first experiment, no…

A stylistics-based approach to teaching poetry in the English as a foreign language classroom is examined. Since students may not have the linguistic skills to appreciate a poem, an analytical framework is proposed that includes the elements of repetition, confusion, and surprise. Reference is made to two poems, "In a Season of Unemployment"…

This study investigated the capability of Indiana elementary and secondary school teachers to deal effectively with education about the environment and related energy issues. Questions addressed were: (1) What do Indiana teachers know about their physical environment? (2) How do Indiana teachers feel about the environment? and (3) How do the…

Our linguistic environment is so polluted at every level that meaningless, uncritical pseudocommunication is becoming the preferred norm even among the highly educated. (JH)

This study examined the degree to which readers' affective responses to levels of language usage reflect their attitudes toward language usage. The subjects, 51 college juniors and seniors, read nine simulated newspaper interviews and completed five semantic differential scales that indicated their impressions of the interviewee's personality and…

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…

This volume contains papers presented in connection with a symposium held in 1975 and sponsored by Abo Akademi, for the purpose of discussing ongoing research in word-order studies. Papers include: (1) a prolegomena by N.E. Enkvist; (2) "On the Ordering of Sister Constituents in Swedish," by E. Andersson; (3) "What is New…

A method for statistical analysis of semantic differential data in educational evaluation is discussed. Estimated scores for unobserved affective variables are obtained using the canonical factor regression method. This method overcomes previous prolems of bias and inefficiency in computing composite affective indices. In an application of the…

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…