The primary purpose of the present study was to determine whether recent findings documenting the benefits of text-related motor activity on young children's memory for reading passages [Glenberg, A. M., Gutierrez, T., Levin, J. R., Japuntich, S., & Kaschak, M. (2004). Activity and imagined activity can enhance young readers' reading…

Elementary school children's understanding was assessed after they read or listened to brief texts that described a scene, explained a sequence of events, or told a story. Results indicated that effectiveness in understanding depends on the fluency with which component processes of perceptual recognition, comprehension, and memory are coordinated.…

Results of a study show that reading and listening comprehension depend on the same language processing skills and that localized processing skills, not global organizational skills, are a major source of individual differences in language processing. (JM)

The purpose of this study was to examine the use of auditory memory tests to predict reading achievement of elementary pupils. Auditory memory was defined as the ability of an individual to reproduce digits, letters, sounds, words, or serial commands, immediately and correctly, in sequential order, after having heard them only once. One hundred…

To understand a text, a reader must engage in three important cognitive activities--recognition, comprehension, and memory. Based on this premise, two experiments were conducted with children to assess individual and developmental differences in speed of word recognition and how these differences related to performance on a variety of memory…

Three studies of language comprehension skills compared 9- and 10-year-old learning-disabled children (LDC) with difficulty retaining verbal information (n=8) with LDC with normal memory spans (n=8) and normally achieving children (n=16). LDC did not have significant impairments in listening comprehension. However, LDC may experience difficulties…

Results of three studies suggest that, to notice inconsistencies in prose, children have to encode and store information, draw relevant inferences, retrieve and maintain inferred propositions in working memory, and compare them. Third through sixth graders do not spontaneously carry out those processes that they are capable of carrying out. (JMB)

Suggests that to develop fluency, educators need teacher-directed lessons in which children spend the maximum amount of time engaged in reading connected text. Presents the National Reading Panel's (2000) examination of research on guided oral reading in order to explore what works. Discusses research on effectiveness of reading practices and…

The final report and a general summary of a research project that assessed the developmental differences in children's use of constructive reading strategies are presented in this paper. The five chapters of the final report offer descriptions of separate studies conducted in the following areas: children's metacognitive knowledge about reading;…

Contends that teaching students to depend on written material without teaching effective habits of recall should be discouraged. (RB)

Children's ability to recall information and draw inferences from orally presented narratives was examined in sixteen nine- to ten-year-old language/learning (LLD) disabled children and two groups of normally developing children. The LLD children did not differ significantly from the younger aged control group. (Author/DB)

A total of 96 binary statements were administered to 120 children randomly selected from 3 academic levels. The Constituent Comparison Model accounts for the results obtained in this study. (HS)

Investigates the influence of vocal intonation on five- and seven-year-old children's processing of explicit and implicit text concepts. Assesses comprehension of narratives through cued recall, recognition, and free recall tasks. Concludes that young children assign more weight to vocal information in making assessments of story outcome than do…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of promoting relational thinking, using "elaborative interrogation" techniques, to facilitate the content acquisition of 36 elementary school students with mild disabilities. Results indicated that students coached in relational thinking who generated their own explanations outperformed students who…

Recent studies have offered support for a constructive view of sentence memory in children, based on their preference in recognition errors for true inferences, which can be drawn from input sentences, over false inferences. However, with the materials used in these studies, this preference may reflect responding either on the basis of semantic or…