PURPOSE Prior studies of discourse comprehension have concluded that the deficits of persons with aphasia (PWA) in syntactically based comprehension of sentences in isolation are not predictive of deficits in comprehension of sentences in discourse (Brookshire & Nicholas, 1984; Caplan & Evans, 1990). However, these studies used semantically constrained sentences in discourse, which do not requi...

Sketching is an important means of communication in software engineering practice. Yet, there is little research investigating the use of sketches. We want to contribute a better understanding of sketching, in particular its use during program comprehension. We propose a controlled experiment to investigate the effectiveness and efficiency of program comprehension with the support of sketches a...

We investigated age-related improvement in speed and accuracy of complex language comprehension with 361 children attending kindergarten and the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. Language comprehension was measured using both the neuropsychological procedure proposed by Luria (1966, 1980) and an adapted version of the Token Test. Levels of short-term memory and verbal intelligence were contro...

In the context of observations that students lack mastery of elementary reading comprehension in Malayalam even by the end of 5-7 years of formal schooling, this study applies multiple regression analysis for reading comprehension. Longitudinal survey data from a representative sample of 159 lower primary students from grade 2 to 4 revealed Reading Comprehension as significantly and positively ...

With the recent renewed emphasis on the importance of providing instruction to improve expository discourse comprehension and production skills, speech–language pathologists need to be prepared to implement effective intervention to meet this critical need in older children and adolescents with language disorders. The purpose of this review article is to present intervention techniques, approac...

the present study attempted the relative effect of explicit teaching of textual metadiscourse markers on esap reading comprehension performance of iranian university students through an awareness raising experiment. a sixty-item multiple choice esap reading comprehension test of accounting was developed and validated to act as the pre-test and post-test. the test included items for assessing sp...

During comprehension, a listener can rapidly follow a frontally seated speaker's gaze to an object before its mention, a behavior which can shorten latencies in speeded sentence verification. However, the robustness of gaze-following, its interaction with core comprehension processes such as syntactic structuring, and the persistence of its effects are unclear. In two "visual-world" eye-trackin...

Although some claim that reading moral stories to children will improve their moral literacy (see, e.g., Bennett, 1993), little research has been done that bears on this question. The purposes of this study were to (a) test the idea that children can extract the theme from a moral story and (b) test for developmental differences in moral theme comprehension. Participants from 3rd and 5th grades...

There is at present no clear consensus as to the nature of the relations between oral vocabulary and specific literacy skills. The present study distinguished between vocabulary breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge to better explain the role of oral vocabulary in various reading skills. A sample of 60 typically developing Grade 4 students was assessed on measures of receptive and expressiv...