100-word speech samples of alcoholic and schizophrenic Ss were examined in order to relate characteristics of these samples to the differential predictability of (a) alcoholic speech under drug versus nondrug conditions (LSD-25), and (b) schizophrenic and alcoholic speech, using the cloze procedure. The deleted words in the samples were identified as to grammatical class form and frequency of u...

The intent of the study was to find out whether raters possessing certain characteristics might be better at predicting speech in general, using the cloze procedure, and also whether some raters might be better at predicting certain types of speech (alcoholic vs. schizophrenic speech). 279 raters were characterized in terms of IS variables, including 7 socioeconomic characteristics and 6 verbal...

Previous research suggests, though by no means consistently, that schizophrenic patients may be less able than normals to predict the speech of other people, and that schizophrenic speech is less predictable than normal speech. The present experiment tests these two suggestions and also a third possibility, that the difference between schizophrenic and normal speech is less marked for schizophr...

The aim of the study was to verify the accuracy of the formula for assessing the difficulty of texts written in Polish (Pisarek 1969). The study involved 1,309 persons aged between 15 and 84. 15 texts were used, each approximately 300 words long, representing different subjects and varied difficulty level. Text comprehension was checked with multiple choice tests, the cloze procedure and open-e...

Reading comprehension can be seen as a process dependent on the interaction of 'topdown' and 'bottom-up' processes. An important, but neglected, feature of this process concerns the effects of rhetorical organization. This article describes an experiment in which four rhetorically different texts, with identical subject matter, were read by 490 Hong Kong Chinese school children (mean age 14.1),...