The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between self concept and reading ability at different stages in a child's school career. Subjects were selected at random from grades three, five, seven, eight, ten and twelve from schools in one school district. Approximately 125 to 150 students at each grade level were tested with the Nelson Reading Test or the Nelson Denny Reading Test and the students were then assigned to groups of poor, average or good readers on the basis of their percentile scores for their grade. Twenty students were randomly selected from each ability group at each grade level to receive the Piers Harris Children's Self Concept Scale. Raw scores on the reading test were correlated with self concept scores for each grade level. Correlations were significant at the grade three, five, seven, and eight levels, lower but significant at the grade ten level and not significant at the grade twelve level. Mean scores for each ability group at each grade level were computed and analyzed in a six by three factoral design. Effects for ability group and interaction of grade and reading ability were significant. Differences between means for good and poor readers were significant at the grade three, five, seven and eight levels. Post hoc tests were done to find significant tetrad differences. It appears from the results of this study that although self concept and reading ability are positively correlated in the lower grades, the relationship becomes weaker after grade eight and is nonsignificant at the grade twelve level. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

The purpose of this investigation is to examine the effects of certain factors on adults auditory comprehension of complex sentences conjoined with before and after. The factors investigated are: conjunction choice, order of mention, clause placement, and general-knowledge constraints. The sentences used in the study fall into four syntactic categories (Before-1, Before-2, After-1, After-2) and two semantic categories (constrained by general knowledge and unconstrained). Sixteen subjects each participated in two tasks designed to elicit varying reaction times. Stimuli consisted of 160 pre-recorded sentences describing 40 sequences of two events, with corresponding slide illustrations. Reaction time to task stimuli was recorded to the nearest hundredth of a second. Square roots of the reaction times were subjected to analysis of variance. Results indicate that only the placement of the main clause produces a significant effect on subjects' responses, thus lending support to a growing body of data which suggests that the main clause holds a privileged position in the comprehension of complex sentences. Results are discussed with respect to experimental design, previous research and theories of sentence comprehension. / Medicine, Faculty of / Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of / Graduate

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Recognition memory for complex pictures was investigated using 3 variables: meaningf ulness of the target (anomalous or conventional), type of transformation in the distractor (substitution or rearrangement), and extent of transformation (whether the target and distractor were consistent or inconsistent in meaningf ulness) . Three- and four- year olds were familiarized with 16 different thematic scenes with which a child this age would likely have had experience. Half of the target pictures shown to a child were conventional, and half were anomalous, containing either an object or arrangement of objects that did not fit the theme. During the recognition test, targets were paired with distractors that were either conventional or anomalous (yielding the consistent-inconsistent conditions) and contained either a substitution of one object or a rearrangement of objects. Overall, recognition memory was similar for conventional and anomalous targets indicating that both types of pictures were assimilated into schemata equally well. When target and distractor were inconsistent in meaningfulness, recognition memory was facilitated. Thus, information about whether the target contained an anomaly or not was remembered.

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