Examined comprehension of stories with and without obstacles to goal attainment among 16 second- and fifth-grade students and 16 adults. Results suggest that processing characteristics of a task, as well as prior knowledge of problem-solving behavior, affect story understanding. (Auhtor/RH)

A study is reported in which short-term memory capacity, estimated by a probe digit task, and memory for structured language, measured by a probe discourse task, were investigated in an experiment with third and fifth grade IQ-matched children representing two levels of reading comprehension skill. (Author/RM)

Thematization, the relative frequency of a discourse referent, and topicalization are conceptualized as related discourse functions. In a probe recall experiment, a word with a thematized referent was a better recall probe than a word with a nonthematized referent. Also, an agent noun was a better prompt than a recipient, and this semantic…