Provides further evidence of the psychological importance of semantic roles for verbal learning and broadens the realm of earlier work with semantic roles by using connected prose rather than individual sentences. (HOD)

Listeners shadowed lists of words or parts of sentences, and shadowing latencies were recorded. The effect of attended context was interpreted as a result of strategical manipulation of response bias (a resource-limited process), whereas unattended context may be effective through spreading excitation in semantic memory (a data-limited process).…

A variable time delay naming latency paradigm was used to investigate the processing of noun-verb lexical ambiguities (e.g., "watch") in syntactic contexts that biased either the noun or the verb reading. Results support a two-stage model in which all reading of ambiguous words are initially accessed, followed by suppression of…

Two experiments were conducted to test how readers process unattended words in a display and how the semantic category of these flanking words affects response time. (Author/AM)

This study examined the interrelationships among a number of episodic memory tasks and among various attributes of memory. A sample of 200 college students was tested for ten sessions; 28 different measures of episodic memory were obtained. In addition, five measures of semantic memory were available. Results indicated that episodic and semantic…

A study examined hierarchical relationships among three developmental components of reading ability in grades 1 through 3. It was predicted that semantic skills develop initially, followed by letter identification skills, phonological skills, and visual skills. Reading ability was assessed with a word identification task. The semantic components…

Overviews of schema theory, which focuses on the cognitive operations engaged in by the reader, and discourse analysis, which focuses on structural characteristics of the text itself, are presented in this paper. The first section explains the notion of cognitive schemata (patterns of expectations that are applied to incoming information) and…

This report provides a nontechnical summary of a series of studies from a research project with three major foci: memory storage dynamics, memory retrieval dynamics, and coding in semantic memory. A theory of forgetting was developed, involving time and interference factors. Memory traces have two properties: strength and fragility. Consolidation…

When two adults read eleven paragraphs, assigned a meaning to the target word in each paragrah, and answered questions about their strategies for dealing with the difficult/unknown words, they exhibited four strategies, outside of actual definition, that skilled readers use to deal with such words. The most often used strategy is paragraph…

Focusing on research about children's acquisition of reading and spelling skills, this paper discusses the larger picture of reading acquisition, issues addressed by research, and results of this research. The paper cites numerous studies on the subject, including studies on whether environmental print experiences enable young children to process…