A Study of What Chicano and Anglo Children Remember about the Stories They Read and Hear (Abstracted)

Abstract

part by the comprehensibility of a message. The structure of text has been studied in terms of language variables which serve as predictive indexes of the message's level of difficulty (Klare, 1974): Readability formulas, the cloze procedure, vocabulary load, noun frequencies, etc., have been analyzed in the attempt to identify the important elements of language. The common factor among all these approaches has been the examination of the surface features of a message. However, the words and sentences alone are full of ambiguous meanings and are not retained as such entities, but rather are integrated into the context of a larger discourse. Although the physical characteristics are more commonly used and more easily measured, we need to look beyond the visible part of language in order to study its meaning. The necessity of developing a way to assess and represent the underlying meaning (deep structure) of a message is noted in the literature of the last decade. Recently, theorists from various fields have provided semantic networks representing the text structure of a passage as a tool with which the stimulus text and a subject's free recall responses can be compared. Such methods allow one to define the structure of a message, examine its effect on language comprehension, and report a qualitative, as well as quantitative, evaluation of a subject's reconstruction of that message (that is, the information acquired from text).