Some cognitive aspects of reading comprehension

While every teacher intuitively understands reading comprehension, theoretical clarification of the concept of comprehension still is evolving. Perhaps what we know about reading comprehension concerns more what it is not than what it is. Reading comprehension is not vocabulary knowledge entirely, although that must be an important component. Also necessary, but not sufficient, for accurate reading comprehension is ability to detect meanings intrinsic to certain sentence structures.2 Existing studies of the retention of connected discourse have shown that readers forget such information as writing style and specific sentence form, and, instead, remember the general theme or semantic context. Sachs,3 for example, inserted test sentences into paragraphs presented to adults. She later adminstered a recognition test for these sentences. She found that people could detect changes in meaning, but not changes in factors not affecting meaning, such as sentence structure. Studies also have demonstrated that phrases related to a paragraph's theme are remembered better than phrases unrelated to theme. These findings indicate that recall of connected discourse cannot be characterized as rote knowledge of the material, but is more likely a function of the reader's knowledge structure. (We should note that the term knowledge structure is an abstraction, not meant to refer to physical structure.) Often, reading comprehension is implicitly considered as what remains when more tangible variables like word recognition, phonics, letter naming, syllabication, recognition of visual forms of sounds, and syntactic forms are removed from the equation. A more constructive approach to the problem of reading comprehension has resulted from the work of Jean Piaget and his followers. This approach assumes that, to understand and remember what he reads, the child must be able to relate new information to previous knowledge, obviously a complicated

Cognitive psychology · Comprehension · Context (archaeology · Linguistics · Meaning (existential · Reading (process · Reading comprehension · Sentence · Theme (computing · Vocabulary · Computer Science · Educational Strategies and Epistemologies · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development · Science Education and Pedagogy

• Educational psychology

  David Paul Ausubel•Educational psychology•1978

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• Remembering

  Open Access•Frederic C Bartlett, Walter Kintsch•Remembering•1995

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• Recognition memory for syntactic and semantic aspects of connected discourse

  Open Access•Jacqueline Sachs, Jacqueline Strunk Sachs•Perception & Psychophysics•1967

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• Syntactic Structures

  Noam Chomsky•Syntactic Structures•1957

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• The Responses of Good and Poor Readers When Asked to Read for Different Purposes

  Helen K Smith•Reading Research Quarterly•1967

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