Noting that although some children read aloud with apparent fluency, they fail to understand fully or remember connected discourse, this book brings together research on children who have a specific comprehension deficit. The book first provides an introduction and overview of adult and child text comprehension, and then describes the research.…

A study examined the effects of prior knowledge and the explicitness of text connectivity on various measures of reading ability. Subjects were 130 eighth grade students who read 6 prose passages that had been manipulated for content familiarity and for use of explicit connectives and implied connectives (those brought about by the author's…

Retroactive interference (RI) in prose learning was investigated in an experiment where passages were constructed on the basis of a predetermined logical structure. This structure made it possible to operationally define similarity and assess the effects of RI for inferential information as well as that stated directly in the original passage.…

This study attempted to elucidate the effects of context and level of processing on comprehension and memory for prose. Two aspects of memory for prose were investigated: the amount of information remembered and the semantic interpretation assigned to ambiguous paragraphs. Task instructions and exposure duration of the passages were manipulated to…

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)

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…

This study addressed four research questions: (1) Can first graders comprehend and explain cohesive ties in reading?; (2) Can first graders comprehend and explain ungrammatical or ambiguous cohesive items in reading?; (3) Is the control of cohesive elements in reading related to measures of reading achievement in first grade?; and (4) What…

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 inventory is designed to identify individuals' reading abilities, their attendant strengths and weaknesses, and the difficulty level of materials most appropriate for instruction. The inventory allows the user to measure reading achievement; determine the independent, instructional, and frustration reading levels; and diagnose an individual's…

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…

This report contains brief descriptions of 37 published and unpublished works and ongoing studies produced by a project designed to investigate the ways in which both children and adults comprehend and remember connected discourse. Among the topics of the published works, which include articles, book chapters, and a book, are the following: story…

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…

Five orders of approximation to normal English prose were constructed; 5th, 10th, 25th, 50th, and 100th plus. Five cloze tests were then constructed by inserting blanks for deleted words in 5 word segments (5th order), 10 word segments (10th), 25 word segments (25th), 50 word segments (50th), and 100 word segments of five different passages of…