This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 17 titles deal with the following topics: the effects of preinstructional activities on the learning and retention of prose; the interaction of picture and print in reading instruction; the perception of structure in scrambled texts; models for the encoding of meaning in memory; the cue systems involved in prose processing; the effect of linguistic connectives on reading comprehension; a comparison of the effects of word frequency and graphic feature characteristics upon the word recognition performance of first grade children; the predictability of four types of sentences as measured by the eye-voice span of graduate student readers; an investigation of cloze procedure as a memory-search process; a study of the organization of concepts in semantic memory and semantic processing; the effects of maturation and achievement upon passage independent test performance; a psycholinguistic description of comprehension as demonstrated by gifted readers in grades four and five; covert speech in the beginning reading process; reorganization and the recall of prose; and the relationship of imagery and propositions to the understanding of sentences. (MAI)