A study extended word association methodology beyond isolated word stimuli to investigate the effects of written context on the meanings that proficient readers impart to words. A repeated-measures design was used to assess the responses of 62 sixth grade readers to target words at three levels: no context, limited context, and expanded context.…

Good readers in grades 5 and 6 read material changed to include particular types of orthographic anomalies to determine if the perceptual unit in reading was the letter or some other unit larger than the letter. (HOD)

This study tested the following hypotheses: (1) that children would use both verbal-associative and acoustic memory attributes when encoding words in memory, and that the recall of younger children would indicate dominance of the acoustic attribute while the recall of older children would indicate dominance of the verbal-associative attribute; (2)…

Details two experiments that assessed the effect of vocabulary difficulty on three measures of text comprehension--free recall, summary recall, and sentence recognition. (FL)

Evaluates the relative importance of graphic and contextual information in word recognition, as well as the relative importance of several specific sources of contextual information (lexical, semantic, syntactic, discourse) among second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade students. Finds that students use more graphic than contextual information at target…

Investigates the degree to which practice in isolated word recognition affects children's speed of recognizing words presented within a sentence context. Finds that increased speed of word recognition interacts in a compensatory fashion with reliance upon context as an aid to word recognition. (RS)

Examines contributions of vowel signs in reading Hebrew on memory and comprehension. Finds that vowel signs speeded up recognition memory of words in third graders, and improved recall of words printed in the context of mixed lists in sixth graders. Finds also that vowelization improved memory and comprehension of some prose texts. (RS)

A study investigated the effect of training Dutch students to learn to derive word meanings from written context. Subjects, 64 grade 6 primary school children, were randomly divided into control and experimental groups. The experimental group followed eight lessons in their mothertongue (Dutch), while the control group followed their regular…

A study investigated whether basal reading instruction combined with whole language development instruction would help a group of sixth graders improve in reading skills as measured by the Metropolitan Reading Test. Subjects, 82 students from a metropolitan area in the Southwest, were given pretests and posttests which measured performance in word…

This experiment was a direct test of the hypothesis that picture-word differences in discrimination learning are a function of apparent frequency differences associated with two types of material. The subjects consisted of 80 sixth graders randomly selected from two elementary schools located in middle-class neighborhoods. Each subject was tested…

The purpose of this experiment was to replicate and extend previous work which showed substantial differences between good readers (GR) and poor readers (PR) in the time taken to encode single words. The technique used was based on the memory-scanning and visual-scanning procedure first used by Sternberg. The subjects for the study consisted of 30…

Reveals high awareness of comparison/contrast structure and low awareness of causation structure. Supports the hypothesis that structure-aware students are more likely to use a structural strategy when reading than unaware students. Reveals that sixth graders have some text structure knowledge and may be promising candidates for instruction in how…

Poor comprehenders from grades five and six were asked to read and rate the comprehensibility of three short passages. Passages with large numbers of modifying words were considered the least comprehensible. Support exists for the hypothesis that poor comprehenders process print in piecemeal fashion. (Author/JN)

Indicates that comprehension was enhanced for sixth grade remedial readers when word recognition and pronunciation were drilled to mastery before a passage was read. (MKM)

Examines word recognition speed during an on-line reading task that incorporated both a naming latency and a subsequent cued-recall memory requirement. Interprets results in terms of context effects which extend beyond sentence completion boundaries and in terms of developmental differences in automatic expectancy and semantic integration effects.…