Identifies and describes major factors interacting with readability measures in 36 experimental studies analyzing the validity of such measures. (RB)

Fifty-one deaf students (18- to 25-years-old) significantly increased their reading comprehension skills after learning a "netowrking" strategy which focused on identifying the conceptual ideas withing a text, specifying their relative importance, and diagraming the textual information. (Author/CL)

Discusses three experiments conducted to determine whether inferences that function so as to preserve the coherence of a passage are drawn in the course of comprehension. (Author/FL)

Describes a study in which it was found that informational background has some effect on reading speed and comprehension. (TJ)

Four experiments involving 286 undergraduates examined social influences on metacognition, testing whether learner's knowledge that colearners have questions about the material affects their own levels of comprehension. Overall, the more questions colearners signaled having, the more confusion learners admitted having. (SLD)

Interviewed students about their experiences preparing for final university examinations. Analyzed processes of learning used during review, and in particular, the ways in which understanding and memorizing were described. Found that one recurring aspect of the review process involved the creation of "knowledge objects"--tightly structured,…

Investigates the impact of causal discourse markers (connectives and signaling phrases) on the comprehension of expository texts in a first language (L1) and a second language (L2). Indicates that readers benefit from the presence of causal relational markers both in L1 and in L2. Discusses implications for (theories of) text processing as well as…

Notes that presbycusis, hearing loss associated with aging, may be marked by a second dimension of hearing loss, a loss in vocalic sensitivity. Reports on the development of the Vocalic Sensitivity Test, which controls for the verbal elements in speech while also allowing for the vocalics to exercise their normal metacommunicative function of…

Investigates how the dimensionality of computer-generated graphs affects users' abilities to extract information from the graphs. Finds two-dimensional graphs more reliable in communicating information quickly and accurately than corresponding three-dimensional graphs. Notes that a commonly used, but technically incorrect, three-dimensional graph…

Analysis of the effect of an authentic, unedited French radio program on student listening skills found that listening comprehension improved with increased exposure to authentic speech, suggesting that adjusting levels of speech speed, content, and form according to students' developing comprehension might not be essential to improving listening…

Investigates the degree to which listeners are sensitive to the social relations expressed in choice of a name when referring to a third person during a conversation. Concludes that the social information inherent in names is picked up by readers and encoded into memory. (HB)

Explores one aspect of the relationship between intonation and punctuation. Outlines the historical development of punctuation, and compares twentieth-century punctuation rules with what is known about the division of connected speech into intonation-groups. Suggests that, where syntactic prescription and intonational usage conflict, a return to…

Tests how well two models of text comprehension (one referential and one causal) predicted the importance ratings and the recall of procedural texts. Finds better predictive power of the causal model for importance ratings; neither model performed well with recall; and neither model was as predictive of procedural text as they were in previous…

Finds that the updating of situation models is achieved by accessing both locational and temporal links in the knowledge-based spatial representation. (SR)

The mental representations and processes used in verbal comprehension were studied in 2 preliminary studies and 2 experiments involving a total of 158 college students solving synonym or sentence completion tasks. Response choices and latencies could be predicted with explicit information-processing models. Implications for theories of…