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The goal of this study was to link a computational psychological model to instructional practice. W. Kintsch's (Kintsch and T. A. Van Dijk, 1978; J. R. Miller and Kintsch, 1980) reading comprehension model was used to identify locations where inferences were called for in a 1,000-word expository text. Then each location was repaired to produce a principled revision. In an experiment with 170 undergraduates (N=170), free recall of the principled revision was much increased over that of the original version. Also, the author of the original text and 7 subject-matter experts provided measures of the shape of the original text's ...

The goal of this study was to link a computational psychological model to instructional practice. W. Kintsch's (Kintsch and T. A. Van Dijk, 1978; J. R. Miller and Kintsch, 1980) reading comprehension model was used to identify locations where inferences were called for in a 1,000-word expository text. Then each location was repaired to produce a principled revision. In an experiment with 170 undergraduates (N=170), free recall of the principled revision was much increased over that of the original version. Also, the author of the original text and 7 subject-matter experts provided measures of the shape of the original text's ...

The effects of vocabulary & text length on the reader's ability to infer the meanings of words from their context & to recall factual content were examined. Adult Ss (N = 136) read easy- or difficult-vocabulary versions of connected prose on unfamiliar topics. Both easy & difficult passages were varied in length by the deletion of low-level propositions. Readers provided fewer correct English synonyms for two-syllable nonwords when passages contained difficult vocabulary; there was no main effect of text length & no interaction. Fact recall tended to be reduced when difficult vocabulary passages were shortened by removal of propositions, however. ...

Researchers studying language comprehension have assumed that more complex sentence constructions take longer to process. However, data obtained from 56 right-handed male undergraduates in the present study, which used reading rates as the dependent measure, suggest that it is the interaction of specific types of deep structure representations with their surface structure forms that accounts for fluctuations in readers' online processing of various sentence types. Those sentences in which the deep structure direct object immediately preceded the verb in the surface structure sequence were easier for comprehenders to process. Data support a dual, parallel processing model of sentence comprehension in ...

The role of connectives in the comprehension of spontaneous discourse was investigated in a series of experiments that tested the effect of the connective 'but' in the realization of causal inferences and the integration of adjacent statements. The role of this connective in the realization of causal inferences was tested through a sentence recognition task and a judgment task. The sentence recognition task required participants to recognize statements that were causally connected to the second statement of the pair as they listened to conversations (Experiment 1). The judgment task required participants to decide whether a sentence causally connected to the ...

In this study, we investigated the psychological processes in spontaneous discourse comprehension through a network theory of discourse representation. Existing models of narrative comprehension describe the importance of causality processing for forming a representation of a text, but usually in the context of deliberately composed texts rather than in spontaneous, unplanned discourse. Our aim was to determine whether spontaneous discourse components with many causal connections are represented more strongly than components with few connections--similar to the findings in text comprehension literature--and whether any such effects depend on the medium in which the spontaneous discourse is presented (oral vs. written). Participants ...

Two experiments examining the influence of a story's structure on the comprehension of its sentences are presented. It was expected that sentences at high levels in a story would take longer to encode than those at low levels, either because cues to the sentences' roles exist within the story or because of differential difficulty of integrating the sentences into the prior context. Moreover, the greater density of new information early in stories might result in comprehension being affected by the serial position of a sentence within a story. The reading times for the individual sentences (or clauses) of stories were ...

Two experiments examining the influence of a story's structure on the comprehension of its sentences are presented. It was expected that sentences at high levels in a story would take longer to encode than those at low levels, either because cues to the sentences' roles exist within the story or because of differential difficulty of integrating the sentences into the prior context. Moreover, the greater density of new information early in stories might result in comprehension being affected by the serial position of a sentence within a story. The reading times for the individual sentences (or clauses) of stories were ...

Reading times (RTs) for 150 undergraduates were gathered for target sentences within stories. The targets either were or were not coreferential with a precursor sentence. In the former case, both the structural importance of the precursor and its distance from the target were varied. The stories were read under tasks differentially emphasizing micro- and macroprocesses. Results show that (1) the task influenced the effects of the textual variables on RT, (2) greater distances and lack of coreference elevated RTs but only when microprocesses were emphasized, and (3) RTs were faster when the precursor was structurally important but only when macroprocesses ...

Examined the relative effects of concrete and abstract advance organizers on students' memory for subsequent prose in 2 experiments. In Exp I, 44 elementary education majors were tested with a 1,200 word essay. Students who effectively encoded a concrete organizer recalled significantly more of the content of a brief subsequent text than did students who effectively encoded an abstract organizer or who read the passage without an organizer. Exp 2 replicated Exp 1 with a 5,000-word passage tested on 47 undergraduate secondary education majors. The results of the 2nd experiment confirmed those of the first. Concrete, written advance organizers (but ...