Abstract: We examined the prediction that people activate perceptual symbols during language comprehension. Subjects read sentences describing an animal or object in a certain location. The shape of the object or animal changed as a function of its location (e.g., eagle in the sky, eagle in a nest). However, this change was only implied by the sentences. After reading a sentence, subjects were presented with a line drawing of the object in question. They judged whether the object had been mentioned in the sentence (Experiment 1) or simply named the object (Experiment 2). In both cases, responses were faster when the pictured object's shape matched the shape implied by the sentence than when there was a mismatch. These results support the hypothesis that perceptual symbols are routinely activated in language comprehension.

Abstract: M. A. Just and P. A. Carpenter’s (1992) capacity theory of comprehension posits a linguistic working memory functionally separated from the representation of linguistic knowledge. G. S. Waters and D. Caplan’s (1996) critique of this approach retained the notion of a separate working memory. In this article, the authors present an alternative account motivated by a connectionist approach to language comprehension. In their view, processing capacity emerges from network architecture and experience and is not a primitive that can vary independently. Individual differences in comprehension do not stem from variations in a separate working memory capacity; instead they emerge from an interaction of biological factors and language experience. This alternative is argued to provide a superior account of comprehension results previously attributed to a separate working memory capacity. The concept of a working memory resource or capacity for temporary storage and manipulation of information has played an important role in many theories of cognition, particularly theories of language processing (e.g., Baddeley, 1986; Engle, Cantor, & Carullo, 1992; Just & Carpenter, 1992). The particular approach advocated by Just and Carpenter (1992) is one in which linguistic working memory capacity directly constrains the operation of language comprehension processes, and that variation in the capacity of linguistic working memory within the normal population is a primary source of individual differences in language comprehension. Just and Carpenter further suggest that reductions in working memory capacity in aging can explain reduced language comprehension and production abilities among normal elderly adults and that aphasic patients’ language comprehension deficits following brain injury may be explained by a deficit in working memory capacity rather than by a loss of linguistic knowledge (Miyake, Carpenter, & Just, 1994). Just and Carpenter’s work has been extremely successful in emphasizing the importance of individual differences in language research, but their approach is not without controversy. Criticisms of their claims have taken several forms. Waters and Caplan (1996) suggested that there are at least two different working memory capacities that subserve language use, and they have sharply criticized the data that Just and Carpenter interpreted in support of a single working memory capacity (see also Caplan & Waters, 1999b; cf. Just, Carpenter, & Keller, 1996). Similarly, several aphasia researchers have suggested that a reduction of working memory capacity is not an adequate description of these

Abstract: To clarify the relationship between oral language and early reading development, the authors administered to 39 children a broad range of oral language measures in 3 areas (metalinguistics, structural language, and narrative discourse); measures of background variables (IQ, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, gender, family literacy); and measures of reading ability (word recognition, pseudoword reading, passage comprehension) in kindergarten and in 1st and 2nd grades. The authors used regression analyses to identify parsimonious models that explained variance in early reading. The main finding of the study was that semantic abilities (i.e., oral definitions and word retrieval), not phonological awareness, predicted 2nd-grade reading comprehension. As expected, phonological awareness skill in kindergarten predicted single-word reading at 1st and 2nd grades. The finding that semantic skills predicted passage comprehension suggests that the importance of different oral language skills to early reading...

Abstract: Young children's communication has often been characterized as egocentric. Some researchers claim that the processing of language involves an initial stage that relies on egocentric heuristics, even in adults. Such an account, combined with general developmental difficulties with late-stage processes, could provide an explanation for much of children's egocentric communication. However, the experimental data reported in this article do not support such an account: In an elicited-production task, 5- to 6-year-old children were found to be sensitive to their partner's perspective. Moreover, in an on-line comprehension task, they showed sensitivity to common-ground information from the initial stages of language processing. We propose that mutual knowledge is not distinct from other knowledge relevant for language processing, and exerts early effects on processing in proportion to its salience and reliability.

Abstract: An investigation is reported into the story comprehension abilities of four groups of children: those with typical specific language impairment (SLI-T), those with pragmatic language impairments who were not autistic (PLI), those with high-functioning autism (HFA) and typically developing controls. The story comprehension task required children to answer questions about the literal content of the story, as well as questions involving two types of inferences: text-connecting and gap-filling. The control children outscored the three clinical groups on story comprehension, but the group means of the clinical groups did not differ. However, categorical examination of the data revealed that children with pragmatic difficulties related to HFA were more likely to have specific inferencing deficits. Error analysis suggested that all children could make inferences, but these were not always relevant to the story context. This supports the notion of weak central coherence underlying deficits in inferencing. There were no group differences on story recall. However, there was a strong relationship between story comprehension and recall, in that those who had better comprehension tended to have better recall. It is concluded that comprehension aids recall by enabling the listener to build a more stable mental representation of the story. The pragmatic deficits seen in autism compromise this process.

Abstract: Older adults, whether or not they have clinically significant hearing loss, have more trouble than their younger counterparts understanding speech in everyday life. These age-related difficulties in speech understanding may be attributed to changes in higher-- level cognitive processes such as language comprehension, memory, attention, and cognitive slowing, or to lower-level sensory and perceptual processes. A complicating factor in determining how these sources might contribute to age-related declines in speech understanding is that they are highly correlated. Experimenters have typically focused either on cognitive declines or sensory declines in artificially optimized test conditions. In contrast, our approach focuses on the complex interactions between age-related changes in cognitive and perceptual factors that affect spoken language comprehension, especially in nonideal, realistic conditions. In this article, we describe our attempts to systematically investigate sensory-cognitive interactions in controlled experimental situations. We begin by looking at experimental conditions that closely approximate everyday listening, and show that older adults do indeed experience deficits in spoken language comprehension relative to younger adults in these conditions. We then review further experiments designed to isolate more precisely the cognitive and perceptual sources of these age-related differences and how they vary with listening condition. in large part, we find that agerelated changes in speech understanding are a consequence of auditory declines. As many as one-third of seniors find that it is difficult to understand conversations in everyday listening situations (Hamilton-Wentworth District Health Council, 1988; see also CHABA, 1988). Among the more common complaints are that talkers seem to mumble or talk too fast and that it is hard to hear when it is noisy. In general, it is especially difficult for older adults to follow a conversation when there are multiple talkers, or when talkers or topics change. Because they miss parts of what is said and lack confidence in the accuracy of their understanding of the parts they do hear, older communicators are prone to anxiety or frustration, and may avoid or be excluded from social interactions. The speech understanding difficulties of older listeners may arise from a number of possible sources. The difficulties could be in higher-level cognitive processes such as language comprehension, memory, attention, and cognitive slowing, or they could be in lower-level sensory and perceptual processes. A complicating factor in determining how these sources might contribute to age-related declines in speech understanding is that they are highly correlated. Perceptual declines in older adults are highly associated with declines in cognition (e.g., Baltes & Lindenberger, 1997; Lindenberger & Baltes, 1994; Uhlmann, Larson, Rees, Koepsell, & Duckert, 1989). In turn, both perceptual and cognitive declines are linked to emotional and social problems and even to mortality (e.g., Appolonio, Carabellese, Frattola, & Trabucchi, 1996; Cacciatore, Napoli, Abete, Marciano, Triassi, & Rengo, 1999; Naramura, Nakanishi, Tatara, Ishiyama, Shiraishi, & Yamamoto, 1999; Seniors Research Group, 1999). Thus, it is very important to understand how the interplay of perceptual and cognitive factors contributes to the speech understanding difficulties of older listeners so that they can be remediated. The need to consider each of these levels and how they inter-relate has received increasing recognition over the last decade (e.g., Baltes & Lindenberger, 1994; CHABA, 1988). Furthermore, the need to determine how older adults perform in naturalistic, as opposed to laboratory, conditions has also been highlighted (e.g., Stern & Carstensen, 2000; WHO, 2001). Nevertheless, up until now, experimenters have typically focused either on cognitive declines or sensory declines in artificially optimized test conditions. …

Abstract: This study investigates whether there is a relationship between negative attitudes toward non-native speakers and poor comprehension of those speakers. Twelve native English speakers whose attitudes toward Koreans had been assessed were asked to complete an interactional map task paired with native Korean speakers. In the task, some but not all of those who had been assessed as having negative attitudes toward Koreans were found to use either strategies that were described as problematizing their partners' utterances, or strategies that were described as avoidance. All participants completed the map task reasonably successfully except where the native English speaker used avoidance strategies, suggesting that the relationship between attitude and comprehension is mediated by the native speaker's choice of strategies. However, there appeared to be a direct relationship between attitude and perceived success of interactions, which may ultimately have the same consequences for interactants as if the relationship were between attitude and actual success.

Abstract: Older adults need to maintain strong decision-making capabilities as they age. However, we know little about how age-related physical and psychological changes affect older adults' judgment and decision processes. This paper reports the results of research comparing older versus younger adults' performance on evaluation and choice tasks about health-plan options. In particular, comprehension and consistency in judgments (across separate versus joint evaluation contexts) were examined. Results indicated that increasing age was related to greater comprehension errors and inconsistent preferences, even when covariates (education, income, gender, self-perceived skill and health, decision style, and attitude toward delegation) were taken into account. Discussion of the results emphasizes difficulties in interpreting the meaning of age differences in performance on decision tasks and the need for research that ascertains the seriousness of the consequences of age differences in real-life tasks. The implications for providing decision-aiding interventions for older adults are highlighted. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract: The present study investigated developmental changes in lexical comprehension skills in early sequential bilinguals, in both Spanish (L1) and English (L2), exploring the effects of age, years of ex...

Abstract: This paper examines individual differences in the rate of early lexical development with a specific interest in gender differences. Twenty-six children were assessed monthly from either 8, 9, or 10 months of age through 14 months of age, using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Gestures. Individual differences in developmental trajectories of vocabulary comprehension and production were explored using two analytic approaches. The first involved traditional parametric statistics, while the latter utilized classification procedures. Both techniques demonstrated that the lexical development of girls outpaced that of boys. The inductive approach also revealed the presence of distinctive “fast” and “slow” trajectories for both comprehension and production that were not exclusively segregated by gender. Cases exhibiting fast trajectories were predominantly girls, but several boys also followed this developmental pattern. The opposite pattern emerged for the slow trajectories. There was strong correspondence between production and comprehension, but a few cases clustered into the fast development group on one measure and the slow group on the other. The identification of these outliers may offer an important tool for exploring mechanisms of language development. Validation of the clustering results was based on the prospective prediction of an external criterion variable, namely, lexical development at 21 months, and by replication on an independent sample.

Abstract: Tables, Figures, and Exhibits.Foreword (Gerald G. Duffy).Preface.The Editors.The Contributors.Part One: New Directions in Comprehension Instruction.Introduction: Improving Comprehension Instruction: An Urgent Priority (Linda B. Gambrell, Cathy Collins Block, and Michael Pressley).1. Reconceptualizing Reading Comprehension (Anne P. Sweet and Catherine Snow).2. The Thinking Process Approach to Comprehension Development: Preparing Students for Their Future Comprehension Challenges (Cathy Collins Block and Rebecca B. Johnson).3. From Good to Memorable: Characteristics of Highly Effective Comprehension Teaching (Ellin Oliver Keene).4. The Guided Reading Lesson: Explaining, Supporting, and Prompting for Comprehension (Gay Su Pinnell).5. Instructional Components for Promoting Thoughtful Literacy Learning (Pamela J. Dunston).Part Two: New Comprehension Lessons Across the Curriculum.6. Differentiating Reading and Writing Lessons to Promote Content Learning (Karen D. Wood).7. Parsing, Questioning, and Rephrasing (PQR): Building Syntactic Knowledge to Improve Reading Comprehension (James Flood, Diane Lapp, and Douglas Fisher).8. Using Writing to Improve Comprehension: A Review of the Writing-to-Reading Research (Bena R. Hef.in and Douglas K. Hartman).9. Research-Based Comprehension Practices That Create Higher-Level Discussions (Janice F. Almasi).10. Goose Bumps and Giggles: Engaging Young Readers' Critical Thinking with Books from the Teachers' Choices Project and Graphic Organizers (Kathy N. Headley and Jean Keeler).Part Three: Integrating Technology and Innovative Instruction.11. Using Technology to Individualize Reading Instruction (David Rose and Bridget Dalton).12. Computers, Kids, and Comprehension: Instructional Practices That Make a Difference (Linda D. Labbo).13. Out of This World: Cyberspace, Literacy, and Learning (Victoria Gentry Ridgeway, Chris L. Peters, and Terrell Seawell Tracy).14. Reading in the Digital Era: Strategies for Building Critical Literacy (Lisa Patel Stevens and Thomas W. Bean).Part Four: Overcoming Comprehension Challenges.15. Hitting the Wall: Helping Struggling Readers Comprehend (D. Ray Reutzel, Kay Camperell, and John A. Smith).16. At-Risk Students: Learning to Break Through Comprehension Barriers (Lynn Romeo).17. Helping Struggling Readers Make Sense of Reading (Irene W. Gaskins, Sally R. Laird, Colleen O'Hara, Theresa Scott, and Cheryl A. Cress).Conclusion: Improving Comprehension Instruction: A Path for the Future (Michael Pressley).Name Index.Subject Index.

Abstract: In this study, we examined whether think-aloud procedures would uncover differences in the kinds of inferences generated by average and below-average readers. Participants were 40 third-grade children who were divided into groups of average and below-average readers. All participants completed measures of nonverbal IQ, reading, language, and working memory, and a story comprehension task that consisted of two conditions: listen through and think aloud. The major findings in this study were that (a) average readers generated significantly more explanatory inferences than below-average readers, and (b) comprehension performance as measured by story recall was significantly better for both groups in the think-aloud condition than in the listen-through condition. The discussion addresses the implications of these findings.

Abstract: The goal of our study is to evaluate the effect on program comprehension of three factors that have not previously been studied in a single experiment. These factors are programmer expertise (expert versus novice), programming task (documentation versus reuse), and the development of understanding over time (phase 1 versus phase 2). This study is carried out in the context of the mental model approach to comprehension based on van Dijk and Kintsch's model l(1983) Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academicr. One key aspect of this model is the distinction between two kinds of representation the reader might construct from a text: (1) the textbase, which refers to what is said in the text and how it is said, and (2) the situation model, which represents the situation referred to by the text. We have evaluated the effect of the three factors mentioned above on the development of both the textbase (or program model) and the situation model in object-oriented program comprehension. We found a four-way interaction of expertise, phase, task and type of model. For the documentation group we found that experts and novices differ in the elaboration of their situation model but not their program model. There was no interaction of expertise with phase and type of model in the documentation group. For the reuse group, there was a three-way interaction between phase, expertise and type of model. For the novice reuse group, the effect of the phase was to increase the construction of the situation model but not the program model. With respect to the task, our results show that novices do not spontaneously construct a strong situation model but are able to do so if the task demands it.

Abstract: A solid, emerging research base exists to inform how we provide meaningful access to the general education curriculum for students with learning disabilities (LD). For example, the presentation of challenging content to academically diverse learners can be demystified using content enhancement techniques. Additionally, a range of strategies can be taught to enhance reading comprehension and expressive writing abilities. Examples from several lines of research in comprehension and writing are used to highlight the underlying features of these empirically based approaches and to introduce the reader to the history of this expanding body of research.

Abstract: The influence of illustrations on children's book preferences and comprehension were studied. Seventy-one first and third graders were shown one of nine books varying in illustration style (realistic or abstract), illustration brightness (bright or somber), and content (illustrations with no text, illustrations with text, or text with no illustrations). Participants were asked 15 comprehension questions and several illustration preference questions. While third graders scored higher than first graders, both groups showed highest comprehension for the Text-plus-Illustrations book content and the lowest for the Illustrations-Only book content. Participants preferred the Bright–Realistic book stimuli significantly more than any other book stimuli.

Abstract: Comprehension difficulty was rated for metaphors of the form NOUN1 IS A NOUN2; in addition, participants completed frames of the form NOUN1 IS ________ with their literal interpretation of the metaphor. Metaphor comprehension was simulated with a computational model based on latent semantic analysis (LSA). The model matched participants' interpretations for both easy and difficult metaphors. When interpreting easy metaphors, both the participants and the model generated highly consistent responses. When interpreting difficult metaphors, both the participants and the model generated disparate responses.

Abstract: Background: The comprehension of written health care information, eg prescription bottle labels or an informed consent form, impacts on communication with patients and their abili

Abstract: In the past, research in interlanguage pragmatics has primarily explained the differences between native speakers’ (NS) and non-native speakers’ (NNS) pragmatic performance based on cross-cultural and linguistic differences. Very few researchers have considered learners’ pragmatic performance based on second language comprehension. In this study, we will examine learners’ pragmatic performance using request strategies. The results of this study reveal that there is a proficiency effect for interpreting request speech acts at different levels of directness. We propose that learners’ processing strategies and capacities are important factors to consider when examining learners’ pragmatic performance.

Abstract: For the past three decades, most metacognitive studies in the research field of reading have focused on how metacognition functions best in specific, successful strategies, instead of investigating how comprehension monitoring can be developed. This results in knowing what metacognitive strategies to use and how they are used, but still does not account for their successful and automatic utilization. The internalization of metacognitive competency therefore seems to deserve further investigation. The present study aims at reassessing both proficient and less-proficient readers’ comprehension monitoring. The findings of this study show, first of all, that proficient readers displayed more competency in monitoring their ongoing thinking process since they tended to monitor their reading process all the time in order to compensate for words that had not been previously decoded. Secondly, the proficient readers employed higher levels of comprehension monitoring which included internal and external consistency (Baker, 1985, 1996). Thirdly, comprehension monitoring can be developed by interaction with a knowledgeable person. Teacher intervention enhanced the less-proficient readers’ development of comprehension monitoring by providing them with basic language knowledge as a resource for comprehension monitoring and integrating sporadic information. Finally, the present study suggests that comprehension monitoring is no less significant than reading strategies. Comprehension monitoring can only become possible when there is something available to be monitored (Perfetti, Maureen, & Foltz, 1996). Instruction of basic language knowledge, therefore, should come before that of comprehension monitoring.

Abstract: In previous publications, the authors reported on the English skills of students who had learned ESL in an experimental comprehension-based program. The performance of grade 4 and 5 students with two or three years of reading and listening was compared to that of students with three years of audio-lingual instruction. On most measures, the students in the comprehension-based program performed as well as or better than the comparison group (Lightbown 1992a; Lightbown & Halter, 1989). In the present paper, the authors report on a follow-up study carried out when students were in grade 8. After six years of an essentially comprehension-based program in ESL, they performed as well as comparison groups of students on measures of comprehension and some measures of oral production but not on measures of written production. This paper includes a description of some particular gaps in the written language of students in the comprehension-based program, includes a follow-up study with secondary school students who ...

Abstract: This study applied relevance theory to second language research by analyzing L2 learners' inferential ability in comprehending conversational implicatures. Eight Japanese students of English in two proficiency levels took a listening test consisting of 22 short dialogues. In the experimental dialogues, the speaker's reply which appeared at the end violated Grice's (1975) relevance maxim and did not provide a direct response to the question. An introspective verbal interview was conducted after each item to allow the researcher to interrogate learners' thought processes and to identify specific strategies used during comprehension. The results showed that, regardless of proficiency differences, learners were able to seek relevance of the speaker's implied meaning based on context. Paralinguistic cues and the rule of adjacency pair were common inferencing strategies. Less proficient learners relied more on background knowledge and key word inferencing. Proficient learners identified more frequently the speaker's intended purpose of using an implicature.