Abstract: Teaches techniques designed to improve reading skills, covering how children can learn by making connections, asking questions, visualization, inferring answers, extracting ideas, and synthesizing information.

Abstract: The “Simple View of Reading” proposes that reading comprehension could be predicted by the product of decoding and linguistic comprehension. A somewhat modified version of this model suggests that the relationship between decoding and linguistic comprehension should be additive rather than multiplicative. This research is comprised of two studies. The first study compared the efficacy of the two formulas: (a) Reading Comprehension = Decoding ◊ Listening Comprehension, and (b) Reading Comprehension = Decoding + Listening Comprehension. The second study reported here explored whether adding another factor, speed of processing, to the Simple View of Reading formula improves its ability to predict reading comprehension. Forty third-grade children were administered word-attack and listening comprehension subtests from the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery; the reading comprehension subtest from the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests; and a list of 40 letters to measure speed of processing. The results showed that Decoding and Listening Comprehension, whether multiplied with each other or added to each other, did not significantly alter the outcome. Furthermore, while 48% of the variance for Reading Comprehension could be explained by Decoding and Listening Comprehension, speed of naming the letters added another 10%. A modified model of reading is proposed which can be expressed by the formula, R = D ◊ C + S.

Abstract: In this study we examined the influence of verbal working memory on sentence comprehension in children with SLI. Twelve children with SLI, 12 normally developing children matched for age (CA), and ...

Abstract: This study investigates the interaction between lexical knowledge and listening comprehension in a second language. Fifty-nine Japanese university students of low-intermediate to advanced English ability were tested using first-language recall protocols as comprehension measures, and dictation as measures of lexical familiarity on four texts of increasing amounts of low-frequency lexical words. Comprehension correlated with text-lexis familiarity at .45; acceptable comprehension levels were significantly associated with higher text-lexis familiarity; good comprehension seldom occurred with text-lexis familiarity levels lower than 75 percent, but occurred frequently at 90+ percent levels. This pattern was observed equally for learners of high, middle, or low second-language listening proficiency. It is concluded that efficient listening strategies may make comprehending lexically complex texts possible, but most learners seem to need very high lexical familiarity for good comprehension.

Abstract: Two experiments investigated gesture as a form of external support for spoken language comprehension. In both experiments, children selected blocks according to a set of videotaped instructions. Across trials, the instructions were given using no gesture, gestures that reinforced speech, and gestures that conflicted with speech. Experiment 1 used spoken messages that were complex for preschool children but not for kindergarten children. Reinforcing gestures facilitated speech comprehension for preschool children but not for kindergarten children, and conflicting gestures hindered comprehension for kindergarten children but not for preschool children. Experiment 2 tested preschool children with simpler spoken messages. Unlike Experiment 1, preschool children's comprehension was not facilitated by reinforcing gestures. However, children's comprehension also was not hindered by conflicting gestures. Thus, the effects of gesture on speech comprehension depend both on the relation of gesture to speech, and on the complexity of the spoken message.

Abstract: The importance of causal structure has been well documented in text comprehension research. This study investigates how both easy and difficult texts can be improved by repairing the causal structure and how causal structure repairs can differentially affect comprehension for more- and less-skilled readers. Following causal network theories of comprehension, principled and replicable types of repairs were made. Causal repairs consisted of (a) arranging text events in temporal order; (b) making implicit goals explicit; and (c) repairing coherence breaks caused by inadequate explanation, multiple causality, or distant causal relations. More- and less-skilled readers read revised and original versions of easy and difficult history texts. Results indicate that both more- and less-skilled readers benefited from the revisions but only for the difficult text. Causal network theories of comprehension provide an appropriate and systematic method for revising texts.

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter investigates the comprehension of discourse-linked and non discourse-linked questions by children and Broca's aphasics. The main goal of this research is to provide a picture of what part of the human language capacity is lost as a result of a specific brain damage. This research deals with the characterization of the patients' linguistic knowledge in terms of a contemporary linguistic theory. It also compares the children's (and aphasics') comprehension of the D-linked and nonD-linked subject and object Wh-questions. There is a clear difference between the D-linked and non-D-linked questions with regard to discourse presupposition. Only nonD-linked Wh-questions move at the level of logical form (LP), which results in the violation of the empty category principle (ECP). D-linked questions do not move at LP and no violation arises. It seems reasonable that the implementation of each linguistic operation is associated with spending a certain amount of resources. As in the case of anything else in the physical world, one might be tempted to use the notion of “energy. The children and Broca's aphasics exhibit some interesting similarities in the pattern of their comprehension errors.

Abstract: Shankweiler and colleagues argue that text comprehensionproblems in young children arise from phonological processingdifficulties. Their work has focused on children with poor wordreading ability. We investigated this hypothesis for children whoexperience comprehension difficulties in the presence of age-appropriate word reading skills. We found that good and poorcomprehenders performed comparably on various measures ofphonological processing and differed on a task that made greaterdemands on working memory, Bradley and Bryant's odd-word-outtask. In a final study, hierarchical regression analyses supportedthis distinction: the odd-word-out task was a strong predictor ofreading comprehension performance even after IQ, vocabulary and single word reading had been controlled for, but a lessmemory-dependent phonological task was not. These studiessupport previous work which indicates that poor comprehenders'problems arise from higher-level processing difficulties.

Abstract: The aim of the present study is to investigate the relationship between language comprehension and language production in Swedish children. This was done longitudinally with 10 children with specific language impairment (SLI), aged 4;0 to 6;3 at Time I, and 10 children with unimpaired language development, aged 3;1 to 3;7 at Time I. The target structure was subordination, more precisely relative clauses. The children's comprehension was tested with picture pointing, act-out and oral response tests. Their production was tested with elicited imitation and sentence completion tests. Data were collected twice, with an interval of six months. The results from the unimpaired children at Time I showed a difference between comprehension and production. At Time II these children scored higher on production than on comprehension. The children with SLI scored significantly higher on comprehension than on production at Time I. In half of the SLI group there was a clear development between the two data collection sessions, diminishing the dissociation. On neither testing did the children with SLI differ significantly from the unimpaired children in comprehension. At both testings, however, the children with SLI had significantly more responses where they did not insert the complementizer in relative clauses. The results indicate that the relationship between comprehension and production is different at different stages in development. They also show that structures involving dependency relations are particularly difficult to produce for children with SLI.

Abstract: The conditions for verbal irony comprehension implicitly or directly claimed as necessary by all of the recent philosophic, linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of verbal irony (Clark and Gerrig 1984; Kreuz and Glucksberg 1989; Kumon-Nakamura, Glucksberg and Brown 1995; Sperber and Wilson 1981, 1986) were experimentally tested. Allusion to a violation of expectations, predictions, desires, preferences, social norms, etc., was confirmed as a necessary condition, but pragmatic insincerity was not. Pragmatically sincere comments can be comprehended ironically. A revised set of conditions was proposed, involving intentional violation of Gricean conversational maxims and the portrayal of a contrast between expectations and reality. A cautionary note was made, however, regarding the viability of a single account of verbal irony comprehension.

Abstract: Two experiments are reported which examine children's ability to use referential context when making syntactic choices in language production and comprehension. In a recent on-line study of auditory comprehension, Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, and Logrip (1999) examined children's and adults' abilities to resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities involving prepositional phrases (e.g., “Put the frog on the napkin into ¨”). Although adults and older children used the referential context to guide their initial analysis (pursuing a destination interpretation in a one-frog context and a modifier interpretation in a two-frog context), 4 to 5-year olds' initial and ultimate analysis was one of destination, regardless of context. The present studies examined whether these differences were attributable to the comprehension process itself or to other sources, such as possible differences in how children perceive the scene and referential situation. In both experiments, children were given a language generation task designed to elicit and test children's ability to refer to a member of a set through restrictive modification. This task was immediately followed by the “put” comprehension task. The findings showed that, in response to a question about a member of a set (e.g., “Which frog went to Mrs. Squid's house?”), 4- to 5-year-olds frequently produced a definite NP with a restrictive prepositional modifier (e.g., “The one on the napkin”). These same children, however, continued to misanalyze put instructions, showing a strong avoidance of restrictive modification during comprehension. Experiment 2 showed that an increase in the salience of the platforms that distinguished the two referents increased overall performance, but still showed the strong asymmetry between production and comprehension. Eye movements were also recorded in Experiment 2, revealing on-line parsing patterns similar to Trueswell et al.: an initial preference for a destination analysis and a failure to revise early referential commitments. These experiments indicate that child–adult differences in parsing preferences arise, in part, from developmental changes in the comprehension process itself and not from a general insensitivity to referential properties of the scene. The findings are consistent with a probabilistic model for uncovering the structure of the input during comprehension, in which more reliable linguistic and discourse-related cues are learned first, followed by a gradually developing ability to take into account other more uncertain (or more difficult to learn) cues to structure.

Abstract: The current study was designed to demonstrate how researchers could use a direct measure of functional reading skills (e.g., rates of silent reading comprehension) to empirically validate the effectiveness of a repeated readings intervention. A multi-element design was used to compare the effects of the treatment with a control condition across three secondary students diagnosed with specific learning disabilities in reading. Results showed that repeated readings increased factual comprehension levels and factual reading comprehension rates. No differences were found across conditions on inferential comprehension levels or rates. Discussion focuses on empirically validating reading interventions using rates of silent reading comprehension and theoretical implications related to enhancing inferential and literal comprehension and fluency. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Abstract: This study investigates the claim that the disruption of comprehension by irrelevant sound is qualitatively different from that of short-term memory for order. Both meaningful and meaningless speech disrupted the comprehensive aspect of the task, but the effect of meaningful speech was significantly greater. Both rehearsal and semantic processing, which are involved in reading comprehension, seem to be susceptible to disruption by irrelevant meaningful speech. The study provides some evidence to suggest that the presence of meaning in the irrelevant sound in creases disruption of performance in cognitive tasks that also call upon processing of meaning.

Abstract: Large-scale assessment programs are beginning to design group assessment tasks in which small groups of students collaborate to solve problems or complete projects. Little is known, however, about the effects of collaboration on students' cognitive processes and performance on such tests. The present study compared, student performance on language arts tests in which they either were or were not permitted to discuss the story they were required to read and interpret. The analyses compared the quality of student responses on test forms with and without collaboration, examined qualitative changes in students' responses before and after collaboration, and examined students' reflections about the impact of collaboration on their understanding of the story. The results show that a 10-min discussion of the story in three-person groups had a substantial impact on students' understanding of the story. Implications for the design of instructional and assessment contexts with peer collaboration are discussed.

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between written and spoken language, and questions whether skills and strategies supposedly used in reading can be effectively transferred to listening. It suggests that in listening, working from the text, or from texts in general, may be a more productive way of approaching comprehension than working from the notion of ‘strategies’.

Abstract: Many patients with progressive fluent aphasia present with poor verbal comprehension and profound word-finding difficulties in the context of much better picture comprehension and object use. The Japanese term Gogi (literally “word-meaning”) aphasia matches this behavioural pattern. The alternative label of semantic dementia is most often used for these patients and this term emphasises a generalised degradation of conceptual knowledge that encompasses both verbal and nonverbal comprehension. The study presented here investigates whether progressive fluent aphasia has a functional impairment limited to the verbal domain (Gogi aphasia) or more widespread involvement of all conceptual knowledge (semantic dementia). We report data collected from a patient with progressive fluent aphasia, IW, who presented with profound word-finding difficulties and relatively poor word comprehension. The predictions of three theoretical interpretations of this pattern are investigated in a series of experimental tasks. We ar...

Abstract: The prevalence and the natural history of primary speech and language delays were two of four domains covered in a systematic review of the literature related to screening for speech and language delay carried out for the NHS in the UK. The structure and process of the full literature review is introduced and criteria for inclusion in the two domains are specified. The resulting data set gave 16 prevalence estimates generated from 21 publications and 12 natural history studies generated from 18 publications. Results are summarized for six subdivisions of primary speech and language delays: (1) speech and/or language, (2) language only, (3) speech only, (4) expression with comprehension, (5) expression only and (6) comprehension only. Combination of the data suggests that both concurrent and predictive case definition can be problematic. Prediction improves if language is taken independently of speech and if expressive and receptive language are taken together. The results are discussed in terms of the need to develop a model of prevalence based on risk of subsequent difficulties.

Abstract: Reading timeandcomprehensionfor subject-relative (e.g., The pilot that admired the nurse dominated the conversation) and object-relative (e.g., The pilot that the nurse admired dominated the conversation) constructions were compared among younger and older readers. Younger adults, but not older adults, differentially allocated time to the more taxing object-relative constructions. Although there were no age differences in comprehension of subject-relative constructions, older adults demonstrated lower levels of comprehension for object-relative sentences. Inconsistent with a modularity view positing preservation in ''interpretive'' processes with age, these results suggest that age-related differences in working-memory capacity limit responsiveness to text demands, thus compromising sentence comprehension.

Abstract: There are numerous guides on Web design but for the most part, these are based on designers' intuition and common sense — with little theoretical or experimental validation. A major problem is that there is a general lack of cognitive guidelines for Web design. Of the few available theoretical guidelines for designing hypermedia documents, very little experimental research is available that tests the guidelines in a Web context. This study empirically addresses the issue: do home pages designed according to theoretical guidelines lead to better comprehension of information at a Web site? Comprehension was measured along three dimensions: comprehension accuracy, comprehension speed, and perceived comprehension. The results of this study suggest that cognitively designed home pages lead to better comprehension than non-cognitively designed home pages, regardless of whether the home page is primarily graphics-based or text-based. The implications of these results for researchers and practitioners are discussed.

Abstract: Four experiments investigated 3-year-olds' understanding of the appearance-reality distinction using both J. Flavell, F. Green, and J. Flavell's (1986) typical verbal response paradigm and a new, nonverbal response paradigm. Both paradigms require verbal questioning, but the former involves a verbal response and the latter a nonverbal one. In the nonverbal paradigm, children were shown a deceptive object and asked to respond, nonverbally, to 2 different functional requests, 1 concerning the object's apparent property and 1 its real property. In the verbal paradigm, children were asked to state what the object looked like and what it really was. In the verbal paradigm, children were about 30% correct (a rate matching that in the literature), whereas over 90% of the same children were correct in the nonverbal paradigm. Participating in the verbal paradigm first had a detrimental effect on the children's performance in the nonverbal paradigm, but the reverse order had no effect. These results suggest that 3-year-olds can represent two conflicting properties of a deceptive object and thus understand the appearance-reality distinction in the nonverbal domain.

Abstract: This paper describes two case studies of children learning to use voice output communication aids (VOCAs). Both children were under 6 years of age and had severe cognitive disabilities. Intervention consisted of teaching the children to use their VOCAs in joint activity routines to request items. We measured the participants' comprehension of targeted vocabulary before and during intervention. Both participants learned to request a total of six different objects using their VOCAs. In addition, they showed evidence of increased comprehension skills for the names of the objects requested. These results suggest the need for further research demonstrating a causal relationship between VOCA use and gains in speech comprehension.

Abstract: In this article we consider the difficulties of children who have a specific reading comprehension problem. Our earlier work has shown that good and poor comprehenders differ, in particular, in their ability to make inferences, integrate information in text, understand story structure, and monitor their understanding. We outline some studies that illustrate the poor comprehenders' problems and present two studies that use a comprehension-age match design to explore the direction of causality between comprehension skill and other abilities. We also present data from the first and second stages of a longitudinal study, when the children were 7 to 8 and 8 to 9 years old. Multiple regression analyses show that a number of factors predict significant variance in comprehension skill even after general ability factors such as IQ and vocabulary have been taken into account. These findings suggest that, not only can children have comprehension problems in the absence of word recognition problems, but that distinctly different skills predict variance in word recognition and variance in comprehension. The data support the view that single-word reading skills and the ability to build integrated text representations make independent contributions to overall reading ability. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of children's problems in text comprehension, for deaf readers, and for remediation.

Abstract: Little research has been done comparing reading comprehension of analogies between first language (L1) and second language (L2) readers, despite the fact that many L1 reading experts believe that analogies facilitate reading comprehension. This article explores the impact of analogies and prior content knowledge on reading comprehension of expository texts by both L1 and L2 readers. Written recall protocols from approximately 163 participants were analyzed for 2 texts. Readers were university students of either French or English as a foreign language and were categorized according to level of proficiency and amount of prior content knowledge. Participants read either an analogy or nonanalogy version of 2 separate passages in either their L1 or L2. Analogy had a debilitating effect on comprehension regardless of learner group on the 1st text and no significant effect on the 2nd text. Level of proficiency and prior content knowledge were significantly related to reading comprehension.