Voluntary dehydration is a common phenomenon in school-aged children that adversely affects cognitive functions.

No abstract

Neurocognitive function is impaired in otherwise healthy children with OSAS. Most functions improve to the level of the control group, indicating that the impaired neurocognitive functions are mostly reversible, at least 3 to 10 months following adenotonsillectomy.

Subjects read stories 1,400 words long and wrote 60-to 80-word summaries of these stores. Reading time was either unrestricted or limited, and the stories were either presented in natural order or with their paragraphs scrambled. Reading times were longer for the scrambled stories, but the same kind of summaries were produced whether stories were presented in natural or scrambled order. When a well-structured story was used, judges were unable to distinguish the two types of summaries and rated the adequacy of summaries based upon the scrambled version about as high as that of summaries based upon normal stories. For a less well-structured story, judges could differentiate between the summaries from natural and scrambled stories. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the story schema which permits subjects to comprehend scrambled stories by reorganizing them.Text comprehension involves organizing the text in some way and relating the new information provided by the text to knowledge already available. This process of organization and apperception is facilitated when it is controlled and guided by a schema. Text schemata are general knowledge structures that abstract the conventions and principles observed by any given culture in constructing particular types of text. The best understood text schema is the one for stories. Bartlett (1932) was the first psychologist to explore the involvement of schemata in story comprehension. Recently, the study of story comprehension has again become an active research topic among psychologists (Rumelhart, 1975;Schank, 1975;Thorndyke, 1977), and in some of this research the concept of a story schema plays a crucial explanatory role (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1975;Mandler & Johnson, 1977; van Dijk & Kintsch, in press). The present paper provides an experimental demonstration of how the schema guides comprehension under unfavorable experimental conditions, that is, when the stories presented to subjects are scrambled.In order to understand the theoretical implications of the experiment reported below, at least an outline of a theory of story comprehension is required. We assume that comprehension involves, inter alia, the construction of a propositional text base representing the meaning of a text. When the text is sufficiently long, however, this propositional base must be organized into a sequence (or possibly a hierarchy) of subunits. This organization has been called the macrostructure of a text. Each subunit consists of a partially ordered set of propositions, subordinated to a label for that unit, called a macrostructure proposition. A theory of comprehension must specify: (I) how the division into subunits is achieved, and (2) how the macro- proposition for each subunit is derived from the text. It is the first of these processes, the organization into subunits, that can be guided by a schema. Essentially, what we are saying is that the organization of a story is facilitated when the comprehender knows how such a text is usually organized. Thus, the story schema cons...