This study examines three questions: What kinds of think-aloud statements, in particular what kinds of inferences, are made by middle school students while reading expository text? Does thinking aloud affect comprehension as measured by recall and answers to questions? Does thinking aloud add value to the assessment of comprehension beyond what is learned through recall and question answering? Sixty-eight middle-school students read expository texts and thought aloud on one segment and did not think aloud on another segment. After completing each segment, the students recalled the texts and answered comprehension questions. The content of think-alouds and recall was examined using Trabasso and Magliano's (1996a) clausal coding scheme and inferences were differentiated as explanatory, predictive or associative. Students primarily paraphrased the text as they thought aloud and made associative inferences using text information. Thinking aloud was associated with more associative inferences in recall, which correlated negatively with the ability to answer comprehension questions. The content of think-alouds may provide a more sensitive picture of readers' processing than unaided recall or answers to questions.

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Twenty‐nine dyslexic children (mean age 10 yrs) were randomly assigned to piracetam (3.3 gr/d) or matching placebo in a 36‐week double‐Mind study. Event‐related potentials (ERPs) were obtained at the end of treatment from a vigilance paradigm which required a response to letter‐matches or form‐matches. The drug group showed a significant advantage in letter‐bits compared with placebo, and a reduced variance in reaction time. The drug increased the amplitude of three factors from a principal components analysis of ERPs, and was interpreted as increasing a processing negativity when stimuli were letters. Effects upon the prestimulus baseline for letter‐hits were interpreted as faster termination of a CNV under drug for letter‐pairs. Latency of early N100 components were faster under drug, suggesting improved feature analysis. It is concluded that piracetam enhances feature analysis and increases attentional resources among dyslexics when the stimuli are recognized as having linguistic significance.

Five 8- to 10-year-old children with dysphonetic and dyseidetic dyslexia were given instruction in reading comprehension using a story grammar strategy in which story instruction was differentially designed to match the simultaneous or sequential mental processing strengths of each dyslexia subtype. A multiple baseline, single subject experimental design and statistical analyses indicated that the experimental treatments yielded statistically and clinically significant improvements in the proportion of qualitatively important story elements recalled by the subjects, when compared to baseline traditional remedial instruction. The results suggested that students with dyslexia can increase their reading comprehension with training in metacognitive strategies. The question of whether the results were attributable to the subtype-matched methods per se or to strategy training in general, as well as a number of methodological issues, is being explored in subsequent research.