Traces the development of predicate use for genre and cohesion in the narratives of children aged two to five, examining predicate structures and types and their linkages via three types of parallelism and by means of explicit connectives. (Author/SED)

The findings indicated that there were no significant differences between good and poor readers in the nature of information recalled or in their use of perceptual connectives. The type of passage, however, did have a significant effect on the number of perceptual connectives given in the recalls. (Author/NQA)

Explores two approaches to discourse structure and comprehension. Illustrates that prior knowledge is ued in conjunction with cues to construct the macrostructure of the story. Provides evidence that text comprehension is based on the presentation of the propositions of the story. (PMJ)

Describes a question-answering procedure for probing the reader's internal representation of prose. Examines two dimensions of a reader's conceptual organization of plot: hierarchical level and relational density of propositions. (PMJ)

Reports on a study of 60 undergraduates which investigated correlations between style variations (inversion, ornamentation, condensation, poor distribution, and deliberate misleadingness) and such psychological factors as reading ease, mental organization, and recall. (DD)

Describes two subject-paced reading experiments in which word-reading times were collected using the moving-window method. Finds that reading times of content words increase more steeply than reading times for function words. Discusses results in terms of buffer models of reading, the processing of different lexical classes, and hypotheses which…

Adolescents with deafness or partial hearing were assessed on memory for relational and distinctive information when text structure and material concreteness were manipulated. Deaf and hard-of-hearing readers were less likely than hearing readers to integrate text information across idea units, although they may retain as much information from…

Examines comparable speech and writing samples in the British and American components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) to study properties of coordinate structures in English. Findings indicate that "and" is a primary coordinator, that "but" and "or" are more peripheral, and that the concept of…

This study focused on Japanese linguistic features that contribute to producing the paragraph-length and extended connected discourse that is expected at the Advanced and Superior levels in ACTFL oral proficiency interviews (OPIs). From 15 Japanese OPIs at the Intermediate-High through Superior levels, 3,062 predicates were identified. Frequent…

Divided into two phases, a study investigated the differential effects of text with and without logical connectives on college developmental readers' comprehension. In the first phase, 44 sophomores from two sections of a college developmental reading course were administered a cloze comprehension exercise along with a class of 50 regular…

This paper analyzes responses by 20 high school history teachers to student questions about the beginning of the American Revolution. The teachers viewed a 15-minute videtape on the subject, responded to a series of scripted questions read by student actors, and later reflected in writing on their teaching performance. The teachers varied by…

A study designed to examine the variation that occurs in the request production of children between the ages of 6 and 7 observed the kind of requests children make, what they request, whom they ask, and how they formulate their ideas. Twenty native French-speaking children divided into two age groups (6- and 7-year-olds) were asked to complete two…

To analyze the process involved in maintaining conversational coherency, the study described in this paper used a construct called a "context space" that grouped utterances referring to a single issue or episode. The paper defines the types of context spaces, parses individual conversations to identify the underlying model or structure,…

This report describes the work of the text analysis groups of the Center for the Study of Reading, whose goals are to investigate the problem of reading comprehension from the standpoint of comparing properties of texts to the difficulty or ease of reading and to construct appropriate theories to account for text properties. The text analysis…

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…