Downloads & Free Reading Options - Results

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: children's development of syntactic aspects of reading comprehension, the relative contributions of the individual and the text in the comprehension and retention of connected discourse, the relationship between semantic memory retrieval abilities and prose memory outcomes, the perception of shape and letter cues in reading, factors related to the amount of subvocalization exhibited during reading, a mathematical model of word recognition strategies, the effect of prose organization upon recall organization, the resolution of anaphora in written discourse, the relative efficiency of silent and oral reading performance, the effects of oral and written language patterns on comprehension among beginning readers, the context bound effects of picture-text amalgams, the influence of reading ability and mode of presented information on the perception of events, the structure of semantic memory for text, the influence of world knowledge and metacomprehension ability on children's comprehension of short narrative passages, and children's sensitivity to the relative importance of parts of prose. (GT)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: children's development of syntactic aspects of reading comprehension, the relative contributions of the individual and the text in the comprehension and retention of connected discourse, the relationship between semantic memory retrieval abilities and prose memory outcomes, the perception of shape and letter cues in reading, factors related to the amount of subvocalization exhibited during reading, a mathematical model of word recognition strategies, the effect of prose organization upon recall organization, the resolution of anaphora in written discourse, the relative efficiency of silent and oral reading performance, the effects of oral and written language patterns on comprehension among beginning readers, the context bound effects of picture-text amalgams, the influence of reading ability and mode of presented information on the perception of events, the structure of semantic memory for text, the influence of world knowledge and metacomprehension ability on children's comprehension of short narrative passages, and children's sensitivity to the relative importance of parts of prose. (GT)

An oral screening test administered by an adult to a five-year-old child was transcribed and analyzed. The test was chosen as an example of a referential communication task that is also a social communication task. The analysis demonstrates that a participant in communication assumes that the other participants are employing strategies for inferring social meaning, and that a failure of two participants' inferences to match results in a "stumbling" and a misunderstanding even on the literal, referential level. In the case of the screening test, one result of misunderstandings is that the child's overall score is different from what it would have been had she been more skilled in interpreting the social meaning of talk. A key aspect of processes of conversational inference and interpersonal coordination is shown to be the timing of interaction. Behavioral means by which communication is socially and rhythmically organized are discussed, with reference to the development of these means as an aspect of child language acquisition. (JB)

Introduction: Childhood is the root of many behavioral and emotional problems in adulthood. The purpose of this study is to acknowledge children’s capabilities in identifying and understanding the elements of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) in children's stories. Methodology: The discourse analysis and discursive psychology (DP) approach were used in this study. The sample was 12 children (in ages 7 to 12 years old) who were active members of 3 different branches of the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children in Mashhad (2 boys and 2 girls from each branch). These children participated in 3 natural language discussion sessions. Each session lasted for 1 or 1.5 hours which resulted in a 9-hour conversation. Based on the discursive psychology, as body language and intonations transfer meaning, all sessions were recorded with a video camera and mobile phone for analysis. Since the discourse analysis explicitly grounded in semantics and linguistics, it offers a credible research methodology. Findings: The result of the discussion analysis shows that if children are familiar with reading and participate in various book activities, they could express their perception of REBT elements in stories through enriched vocabulary and linguistic units (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, discursive sentences, tone, facial and body movements, proverbs, etc.). It is expected that those who are working with children (i.e., librarians, psychologists, parents, etc.) can base their bibliotherapy programs on the findings of this research and help children prevent or reduce psychological problems and change their irrational beliefs to rational ones. Conclusion: The findings indicate that REBT theory could provide a suitable basis for bibliotherapy programs by which children have the opportunity to experience cognitive change through enjoyable approaches.

This study looked at preschool and first-grade children's ability to draw script-based and text inferences in comprehension of stories they heard. In two experiments, children were asked to recall brief stories and answer two inference questions: one script inference question requiring them to fill in information about the event that was not specifically stated in the story, and a text inference question requiring them to infer relationships between story propositions that could not be inferred on the basis of event knowledge alone. In one experiment the text inference question required a propositional inference on the basis of two premise statements in the story, and in the other experiment the text inference question required an invited inference based on children's real world knowledge. Results suggested that children aged 4 to 6 years are better able to draw inferences based on schematically organized event knowledge than inferences requiring the construction of relationships between propositions not already represented in a schema. Results suggest that text inference questions are inherently more difficult than script-based inference questions and that invited inference questions are easier for children in this age group to answer than propositional inference questions. It is concluded that development of inferential processing in oral text comprehension is characterized as a progression from automatic use of a familiar schema to more purposeful deductive reasoning. (MSE)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 20 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: semantic constructivity in children's comprehension; text-based inferences generated by children in reading written discourse; a review of reading comprehension research; the psycholinguistic processes of beginning readers; the relationship between discourse structures and critical reading; information processing and retrieval of adult college students; the effects of anaphoric references, typographically modified organizers, and oral prequestioning on reading comprehension; word analysis strategies for reading; the effect of question order on reading achievement; sentence characteristics that influence the comprehensibility of text; the effect of chunking on the recall of written discourse; types of information addition in the psycholinguistic process of reading; the relationship of knowledge of given information to reading comprehension; prose learning as a function of adjunct questions and individual differences; and the relationship of language cues used in silent reading to the semantic and syntactic cues revealed in oral reading miscues. (GW)

The term "scaffolding" refers to adult behaviors that support and guide children's participation in activities, including speech events, enabling the children to extend the range of what they are able to do without assistance. A study examined how scaffolding behavior in support of expository discourse differed among preschool teachers in classroom activities with the same children. Study participants included 12 preschool children who participated in activity sessions (e.g., free play, making paper flowers, or making sandwiches) with three teachers in the Psychology Department nursery of the University of Edinburgh. Classroom discourse was recorded and transcribed, and sections in which a child's expository proposition was followed by adult responses that were semantically contingent upon the child's utterance were analyzed. The adults' responses were coded using social interactionist labels and tallied in terms of the scaffolding functions provided; e.g., shaping the child's utterance or representation through feedback; reinforcing a key phrase; maintaining joint attention; linking propositions to experience; and extending the proposition to a greater number of implications. The study found less scaffolding with 5-year-olds than 3- or 4-year-olds, though the questioning function increased with age. The amount of scaffolding provided differed among the teachers, but the distribution by type of scaffolding was remarkably consistent for all adults. (AC)

This study investigated young children's development of understanding of two written genre registers, story and information books, by analyzing 5-year-olds' repeated pretend readings of a typical text of each genre. Ten female and 10 male kindergarten students were read 3 books in each genre during their kindergarten year. At each child's reading session, both a storybook and an information book were read and the child was invited to "pretend read" each book after it was read. All sessions were audiotaped. Results indicate the children were successful in re-enacting both genres and were very sensitive to the co-referentiality versus co-classification features of the two books. The ability to sustain the distinctive textual feature of the respective genre in their readings appears to be the same for each child. Book preference appeared to be unrelated, because most children preferred the information book. It is suggested that the preference for stories comes from pedagogy in early literacy, where story reading is emphasized, based on an unexamined ideology about young children's capacities in learning to use non-story language. Such pedagogy is seen as a possible barrier to children's full access to literacy. Transcripts of the children's "readings" are appended. (MSE)

The discourse of Mexican-American preschoolers during sociodramatic play was investigated to learn what the children knew about the social world and how this knowledge was organized in their speech. The theoretical framework for the study was derived from two sources: the psychological construct of the script and the sociolinguistic view of play as social construction. Social play was defined as a state of engagement in which the successive, nonliteral behaviors of one partner are contingent on the nonliteral behaviors of the other partner. Six focal children selected to participate in the study were arranged in two triads of varied membership. Children were asked to play in the housekeeping area of a classroom and to pretend that the researcher was not present. Observations of 8 hours of play were recorded on videotape. Because plans and scripts were seldom found in the data, preliminary analysis of a portion of the transcribed tapes focused on negotiations and enactments in play behavior. Findings were considered in terms of the extent to which children represented scripts in their play, the relationship between code-switching and script enactment, the nature of children's enactments, and the incidence of successful enactments. (RH)

In its first year, the Hawaiian Language Immersion Program combined kindergarten and first-grade students in two classes. About half of the students had no speaking knowledge of Hawaiian; the remainder had attended Hawaiian-language preschools and/or spoke Hawaiian at home. Both teachers, fluent speakers of Hawaiian, were new to teaching. The teachers spoke only Hawaiian after the first 2 days of school, and students were reminded to speak in Hawaiian. By spring, lapses into English or pidgin became infrequent. Visiting parents were impressed with the warm relationships evident between children and teachers. Classroom organization combined adaptation to Hawaiian values and cultural practices with practices common to other elementary classrooms. While occasionally correcting students' Hawaiian, teachers more commonly modelled correct form or set up repeating routines to support student learning. Teachers treated students as true conversational partners, focusing primarily on content comprehension, with brief but significant instructional sequences inserted. Language learning in peer-peer interactions was encouraged. The students were found to take their work seriously, and were on task a high proportion of the time. (MSE)

In a verbal memory study of language development, third- through sixth-grade children read and orally recalled short, expository passages which were presented in three syntactic paraphrase forms: (1) complex sentences with preverbal elaboration such as complex subject nominalizations and relative clauses, (2) complex sentences with postverbal elaboration, and (3) simple sentences. Syntactic analysis of the children's best recall samples (those showing high semantic recall) revealed that third through fifth graders tended to paraphrase the target information in simple sentences, regardless of the complexity of the material they had read. Sixth graders, however, maintained the original syntax more often than younger subjects, suggesting a better recall memory for syntactically complex features of discourse. The results corroborate previous findings showing that children's speech in the upper elementary grades shifts towards greater structural complexity. As suggested by Ingram (1975), such a shift may reflect important developmental changes in the linguistic strategies children use during this age range for producing complex sentences in connected discourse. (Author)

The goal of the study was to compare the literacy challenges faced by children who speak nonstandard dialects of English and for whom Standard English is a "second dialect" with challenges faced by children for whom Standard English is a "second language." The study focused on the extent to which discourse patterns in the Creole-English speech community and, concomitantly, in the children's linguistic repertoire, are reflected in their registers of academic writing. More specifically, the study examined how challenges related to clause structure (a register feature of academic writing) manifest themselves in Creole-English children's writing compared with the clause-structuring challenges faced by ESL children. Findings indicated that Creole-English-speaking children used more paratactic-hypotactic clause structures typical of spoken or conversational discourse in their writing than their ESL counterparts. The linguistic structure of English-based Creoles as well as the particularities of the creole continuum were purported to contribute to the higher frequency of paratactic and hypotactic clauses in the Creole-English children's academic expository essays.

The effects on short- and long-term recall of words varying in arousal value inserted into prose were studied in 720 fifth-grade children. A 2 x 2 x 2 x 3 design was used consisting of two levels of word arousal value (high and low), two retention intervals (immediate and one week), two directions of the to-be-recalled words from the inserted arousal words (preceding or following the arousal words), and three distances of the to-be-recalled words from the inserted arousal words (one, three, or five words distant). Results were analyzed according to three error types: extralist, intralist, and omissions. No main effect of arousal or interaction with retention interval was obtained. The extralist error analysis revealed that high-arousal words significantly facilitated performance in a forward direction and inhibited or impaired it in a backward direction relative to the effects of the low-arousal words, which inhibited or impaired performance in a forward direction and facilitated it in a backward direction. The direction of this interaction was the same, though not significant, for the omission errors. Intralist errors were so low as to make consideration of them of dubious value. (Author/DI)

The effects of arousal on literal and inferential comprehension of text over short- and long-term retention intervals were studied using 369 elementary school children. Putative arousal manipulations were of two types: expectation and deviations from expectation as established by an advance organizer followed by text that for different experimental conditions varied in structure, and insertion of words varying in arousal value. It was found that expectancy had no significant effect on literal and inferential comprehension at either retention interval. There was also no significant effect of the advance organizer itself. Word arousal (positive affect) significantly aided long-term literal comprehension, in line with previous work, while long-term inferential comprehension was significantly facilitated by negative affect. (Author)

Conventional wisdom holds that many children experience difficulty when they first read expository material after spending most of their reading time with simple narratives. Unfortunately, there is little available data bearing on this belief, nor is it clear how one would go about testing the claim. The labels "narrative" and "exposition" in fact reflect conglomerates of characteristics that affect text processing. However, these characteristics are not found exclusively in one type of text or the other--a narrative can possess many of the characteristics of exposition and vice versa. If children do tend to have greater difficulty with expository text, it is because expository text tends to have certain traits that produce heightened psychological processing difficulty. Perhaps the traditional text-type classification should be abandoned in the study of reading difficulty. Instead, texts should be classified as a function of the characteristics they possess that influence processing. A multidimensional psychological classification scheme of texts could be used to identify children's text processing problems, to investigate the cause of those problems, and to bring about the appropriate instructional changes. (Author/FL)

Some studies of young children's understanding of false belief have generated controversy, even to the extent that others' failure to replicate these studies was viewed as problematic. A Vygotskian perspective on internalization enables researchers to reverse the classic developmental competence-performance distinction, and to argue that the current concern with criteria for competence in terms of a functional theory of mind might be replaced with a concern with those aspects of such tasks that make "successful" performances possible. An acknowledgement of the essential nature of intersubjectivity is a necessary prerequisite to sorting out this theoretical and empirical debate. To support these views, this paper reports a study of preschool children that examined whether structuring false belief tasks to provide opportunities for genuine social interaction would provide evidence of the earlier interpersonal roots of a theory of mind. Results support the Vygotskian claim that children may give evidence of an ability to operate under a more sophisticated theory of mind when they are engaged in social interaction with a more competent peer than when they are tested alone in a traditional false belief task. (MM)

The form of Japanese children's personal narratives is distinctly different from that of English-speaking children. Despite follow-up questions that encouraged them to talk about one personal narrative at length, Japanese children spoke succinctly about collections of experiences rather than elaborating on any one experience. Conversations between mothers in the two cultures were examined in order to account for the way in which cultural narrative style is transmitted to children. Comparison of mothers yielded the following contrasts: (1) Japanese-speaking mothers requested less description from their children than English-speaking mothers; (2) Japanese mothers gave less evaluation and showed more attention than English-speaking mothers; (3) Japanese mothers paid attention more frequently to boys than girls; and (4) at 5 years of age, Japanese children produce 1.22 utterances per turn on average, while English-speaking children produce 2.0 utterances per turn. It is suggested that the production of short narratives in Japan is understood and valued differently from such production in North America. (Author/AB)

The form of Japanese children's personal narratives is distinctly different from that of English-speaking children. Despite follow-up questions that encouraged them to talk about one personal narrative at length, Japanese children spoke succinctly about collections of experiences rather than elaborating on any one experience. Conversations between mothers in the two cultures were examined in order to account for the way in which cultural narrative style is transmitted to children. Comparison of mothers yielded the following contrasts: (1) Japanese-speaking mothers requested less description from their children than English-speaking mothers; (2) Japanese mothers gave less evaluation and showed more attention than English-speaking mothers; (3) Japanese mothers paid attention more frequently to boys than girls; and (4) at 5 years of age, Japanese children produce 1.22 utterances per turn on average, while English-speaking children produce 2.0 utterances per turn. It is suggested that the production of short narratives in Japan is understood and valued differently from such production in North America. (Author/AB)

To understand a text, a reader must engage in three important cognitive activities--recognition, comprehension, and memory. Based on this premise, two experiments were conducted with children to assess individual and developmental differences in speed of word recognition and how these differences related to performance on a variety of memory tasks. One unexpected finding was that although rapidity of word recognition increased sharply and continuously from grade one to grade nine, development was independent of this increase. An important implication of the two experiments is that developmental gains in rapidity of word recognition may have no necessary relation to memory improvement, but that individual differences may go hand in hand with differences among the same individuals in memory skills. Two other experiments with school-aged children revealed that certain effects studied extensively in sentence verification (the negation and comparator effects) replicated well in sentence completion, that stable differences among individual children did exist, and that the differences probably derived from variation in the efficiency with which different children executed elementary cognitive processes. (The full report of the first two experiments is appended.) (HOD)

The effects of imagery instructions, word arousal value, and retention interval on children's literal and inferential comprehension of text was studied using 459 grade 3, 4 and 5 students. Imagery instructions significantly facilitated inferential comprehension on the short-term retention test but this effect disappeared a week later. On the other hand, imagery instructions significantly impaired long-term literal comprehension. Thus the only factor found to significantly enhance long-term comprehension of text was the (positive) arousal manipulation. (Author/SW)