Development of Computer-Based Instructional Systems for Training Essential Components of Reading

摘要

This final report describes studies we have conducted of deficits in reading comprehension skills of low ability, young adult readers, and evaluation studies of computer-based training systems which have been designed to improve essential components of reading shown in prior work to be sources of skill deficiency in such readers. Three experimental studies were carried out investigating reader deficiencies in the inferential processing of texts. The first study (Rosebery, 1986) examined readers' use of semantic entailments (such as the action murdered entailing an agent case (the killer) and a patient case (the victim) in drawing inferences from text. The second study (Warren, 1986) investigated readers' use of relational terms such as causal and adversative connectives (examples are, respectively, as a result and although) in gaining an understanding of high order semantic relations among clauses/sentences within a text. The third study focused on the problem of analyzing referential relations within a text. Texts were constructed containing one or more antecedent noun phases and one or more anaphoric words (a pronoun or lexical substitute). Over the set of texts, we varied the number of antecedent noun phrases, the topical status of the pronoun's referent, referential continuity, the ambiguity of the semantic context of the pronoun, and the syntactic agreement amoung antecedents and the pronoun. The subject's task was to read each text and supply the correct referent for a pronoun when requested.