This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 39 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) oral reading behaviors of early readers; (2) the effects of pictures and mode of presentation on the prose comprehension of third and fifth grade children of varying reading abilities; (3) the effects of improved reading of verb and noun inflectional endings on the reading comprehension of learning disabled students; (4) the effect of message structure on inference making in recall; (5) relationships among concrete and abstract concept development, metacognition, and reading comprehension; (6) hierarchical relationships among the components of the reading abilities of beginning readers; (7) the importance of phrasing to reading comprehension; (8) identification, semantic encoding, and text organization in reading comprehension; (9) the effect of free recall of metaphoric processing in a structured text; (10) the effect of information about sentence referents on children's observational learning of a syntactic rule; and (11) reading processes of skilled older adult readers. (HOD)