Reading comprehension: think and know verbs.

Abstract

Verbs such as think, know, remember, and guess play a pivotal role in understanding, monitoring, and transformation of internal states. We focus on the specific words as think and know, polysemous cognitive verbs that show hierarchical organization and high frequency of use in children's and adults' lexicons. According to Booth and Hall's model, think and know present a conceptual organization that involves low conceptual levels (perception, memory, comprehension) and high conceptual levels (evaluation, metacognition, planning). The aim of this research was to study the relationship between children's comprehension of text processing and the conceptual levels of the above-described verbs. The research concentrated on 9-, 11-, and 13-yr.-old children's ability to understand think and know. Analysis yielded a strong relation between knowledge at the conceptual level of these verbs and reading comprehension skills. Moreover, it highlights the importance of this linguistic competence in skilled readers.