This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 19 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) factual, elaborative, and inferential levels of text processing; (2) the effect of explicitly and implicitly presented rhetorical functions on the comprehension of scientific discourse; (3) reader, writer, and text context variables as influences on text comprehensibility; (4) the relationship of the amount and structure of children's prior knowledge to reading comprehension of expository prose; (5) defining reading comprehension; (6) the role of cognitive development in the acquisition of reading skills; (7) quality of prose recall as a function of cognitive style and test situation; (8) metacognitive awareness and the reading comprehension of fifth grade students; (9) recall of connected discourses as a function of emotion; (10) physiological rhythms and story retention of high and low imagers in second grade; (11) the effect on comprehension of increasing the single-word recoding speed of poor readers; (12) the assignment of suprasegmental features during oral reading; (13) the relation between surface processing variables and comprehension product measures in oral and silent reading; (14) the influence of main idea task and topic sentences on recall; (15) reading proficiency and modes of accessing the internal lexicon; and (16) the use of phonetic and semantic memory codes in good and poor readers. (HTH)