A study investigated whether or not the global structure of a text influences its readability and how that influence might be related to the already recognized influences of vocabulary and sentence length. The subjects, 250 fourth-grade students in Quebec, each read four texts representing four different structures, four subjects, and two levels…

A study investigated the separate and combined effects of the syntactic organization of the sentence, the contextual framework in which a message is embedded, and the readers' past experiences on children's inferential reading comprehension of pragmatic cause/effect statements. The subjects, 144 fourth grade students, were asked to specify the…

A study was conducted to determine the relationship between processing load and ability to locate text segments containing intersentence contradictions. It was hypothesized that less able readers fail to exhibit comprehension monitoring skills because most tasks overload their processing capacity. Subjects were 87 fourth and sixth grade students…

Students at first, fourth, seventh, and tenth grade levels and at graduate levels chose conjunctions "and" and "but" in two-clause sentences with varying degrees of logical relationship, with similar or contrasting clauses. Grade, type of relationship, and similarity were variables in a 5 x 3 x 2 repeated measures analysis of response to logical…

A study investigated whether children and adolescents use commas and the principle of Late Closure to guide sentence parsing decisions as adults do in processing syntactically ambiguous sentences. The study consisted of three experiments, conducted similarly but with different subject groups: 24 university students; 24 fourth-graders; and 19…