Comprehension

Abstract: Individual differences in reading comprehension may reflect differences in working memory capacity, specifically in the trade-off between its processing and storage functions. A poor reader's processes may be inefficient, so that they lessen the amount of additional information that can be maintained in working memory. A test with heavy processing and storage demands was devised to measure this trade-off. Subjects read aloud a series of sentences and then recalled the final word of each sentence. The reading span, the number of final words recalled, varied from two to five for 20 college students. This span correlated with three reading comprehension measures, including verbal SAT and tests involving fact retrieval and pronominal reference. Similar correlations were obtained with a listening span task, showing that the correlation is not specific to reading. These results were contrasted with traditional digit span and word span measures which do not correlate with comprehension.

Abstract: Two instructional studies directed at the comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities of seventh grade poor comprehenders are reported. The four study activities were summarizing (self-review), questioning, clarifying, and predicting. The training method was that of reciprocal teaching, where the tutor and students took turns leading a dialogue centered on pertinent features of the text. In Study 1, a comparison between the reciprocal teaching method and a second intervention modeled on typical classroom practice resulted in greater gains and maintenance over time for the reciprocal procedure. Reciprocal teaching, with an adult model guiding the student to interact with the text in more sophisticated ways, led to a significant improvement in the quality of the summaries and questions. It also led to sizable gains on criterion tests of comprehension, reliable maintenance over time, generalization to classroom comprehension tests, transfer to novel tasks that tapped the trained skills of...

Abstract: A theory of the way working memory capacity constrains comprehension is proposed. The theory proposes that both processing and storage are mediated by activation and that the total amount of activation available in working memory varies among individuals. Individual differences in working memory capacity for language can account for qualitative and quantitative differences among college-age adults in several aspects of language comprehension. One aspect is syntactic modularity: The larger capacity of some individuals permits interaction among syntactic and pragmatic information, so that their syntactic processes are not informationally encapsulated. Another aspect is syntactic ambiguity: The larger capacity of some individuals permits them to maintain multiple interpretations. The theory is instantiated as a production system model in which the amount of activation available to the model affects how it adapts to the transient computational and storage demands that occur in comprehension.

Abstract: Preface Acknowledgements 1. Introduction Part I. The Theory: 2. Cognition and representation 3. Propositional representations 4. Modeling comprehension processes: the construction-integration model Part II. Models of Comprehension: 5. Word identification in discourse 6. Textbases and situation models 7. The role of working memory in comprehension 8. Memory for text 9. Learning from text 10. Word problems 11. Beyond text References name index Subject index.