Assesses the effects of different learning conditions on perceptual span development. Notes the superiority of the contingency-plus-attention group in the training situation but the better transfer of the attention-only group to a standard reading situation. Graphs and bibliography. (RW)

Reports the results of a study that compared the effects of instruction in sentence combining to instruction in sentence reduction or element identification on growth in listening and reading comprehension. (AEA)

Presents a case study of three reading-disabled children. Concludes that pronunciation and comprehension skills are two dissociable components of the reading process and follow separate courses of development. Suggests that the question of whether poor readers are also deficient in language comprehension depends on the types of disabled readers…

Presents a study that compares the efficacy of the two formulas: Reading Comprehension = Decoding x Listening Comprehension, and Reading Comprehension = Decoding + Listening Comprehension. Presents a second study that explores whether adding another factor, speed of processing, to the "Simple View of Reading" formula improves its ability to…

Investigates differences between college students' reading and listening processes in conjunction with variation in oral-based or literate-based language style. Finds that: listening required less cognitive effort than reading, irrespective of language style; listeners and readers alike best comprehended oral-based discourse; and that reading was…

Having young readers manipulate objects to correspond to the characters and actions in a text greatly enhances comprehension as measured by both recall and inference tests. As a step toward classroom implementation, we applied this manipulation strategy in small (three-child) reading groups. For successive critical sentences, one child would read…

According to current theories in discourse research, readers monitor a series of 5 situational dimensions during narrative comprehension (Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). These dimensions are time (e.g., the order of events), space (e.g., locations), protagonist (e.g., main character actions), causality (e.g., how one…

This study examined orthographic learning in oral and silent reading conditions. Dutch third graders read, either aloud or silently, short texts containing novel target (pseudo) words. The acquisition of new word-specific orthographic knowledge was assessed several days later by comparing target spellings with homophonic spellings in tasks…

Background: The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA; Neale, 1997) is a widely used assessment of reading comprehension and word reading accuracy. Spooner, Baddeley, and Gathercole (2004) questioned the suitability of the NARA for identifying children with specific reading comprehension deficits. Aims and methods: An evaluation of the NARA…

In reading research, studies on good and poor reader characteristics abound. However, these findings remain largely scattered in applied linguistics and cognitive and educational psychology. This paper attempts to synthesize current theory and research on the topic in the past 20 years along 3 dimensions: language knowledge and processing ability,…

We review the Simple View of Reading (SVR) model and examine its nature, applicability and validity. We describe the SVR as an abstract framework for understanding the relationship between global linguistic comprehension and word-reading abilities in reading comprehension (RC). We argue that the SVR is neither a full theory of reading nor a…

"Reading Mastery," one of several curriculum components that constitute the "Direct Instruction" curriculum from SRA/McGraw-Hill, is designed to provide systematic instruction in reading to students in grades K-6. "Reading Mastery," which can be used as an intervention program for struggling readers, as a supplement…

To determine whether story mapping would improve reading comprehension, five intermediate grade students with mild learning handicaps and poor comprehension were prepared to use story mapping procedures as a schema-building technique. As they were reading, students learned to identify the setting, problem, goal, action, and outcome of narrative…

The standard dictionary definition of a metaphor--a word or phrase applied to an object or concept that it does not literally denote in order to suggest comparison with another object or concept--is inadequate in that it does not deal with whole sentence metaphors and that it provides no way of distinguishing between a metaphor and a semantic…

This three-part book, a collection of articles by some of the foremost researchers in language comprehension, examines the thought processes involved in listening to conversation or in reading a page of text. The first part of the book deals with what the reader stores from a page during and after comprehension; it investigates the reader's use of…