The Cloze Procedure: A Conspectus

Bickley, A. C.; Ellington, Billie J.; Bickley, Rachel T.

doi:10.1080/10862967009546900

Cited by 40 publications

(18 citation statements)

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“…Finally, the results presented here have implications for a widely used technique in developmental investigations of context utilization, the cloze task (see Bickley, Ellington, & Bickley, 1970). Basically, the subject is presented with a sentence that has a word removed and is asked to produce the missing ward.…”

Section: It Should Be Noted That the Context By Stimulusmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If, as has been argued, the conscious-attention process is less implicated in contextual facilitation as reading proficiency develops, then performance on cloze tasks may be less indieative of actual context usage at the higher reading levels. The correlation between proficiency and cloze performance (Bickley et al, 1970;Ruddell, 1965) may not be indicative of a causal relation. Older and better readers may respond more accurately on cloze tasks due to their larger stores of linguistic and general knowledge.…”

Section: It Should Be Noted That the Context By Stimulusmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mechanisms of sentence context effects in reading: Automatic activation and conscious attention

1979

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In. Experiment 1 subjeets named target words that were preeeded by a eongruous sentenee eontext, an ineongruous sentenee eontext, or no sentenee eontext, under stimulus eonditions that were either normal or degraded by eontrast reduetion. Under normal stimulus eonditions, a eontextual faeilitation effeet, but no eontextual inhibition effeet, was observed.When the target word was degraded, both eontextual facilitation and inhibition were observed. Experiment 2 replieated the inerease in eontextual inhibition under degraded eonditions and also demonstrated that inhibition inereased as the interval between eontextual processing and target-word onset was lengthened. The results were interpreted within the framework of the Posner and Snyder two-proeess theory of expeetaney. Thus, when target-word reeognition is rapid, only the fast-aeting automatie aetivation eomponent of eontext effeets has time to operate. When target-word proeessing is delayed, the eonscious-attention meehanism, whieh is responsible for inhibition effeets, beeomes operative. The relevanee of these results to developmental investigations of the interaction of word recognition and eontextual processing is diseussed.In arecent study, West and Stanovich (1978) had subjects of three ages name a target word that had been preceded by an incomplete sentence that was congruent with the word, by an incomplete sentence that was incongruent with the word, or simply by the word "the" (i.e., a no-context condition). Compared to the reaction times obtained in the no-context condition, naming was faster when the target word was preceded by a congruous context. This contextual facilitation effect did not differ statistically across the three age groups in the study (fourth-graders, sixth-graders, and adults). In fact, correlations involving a standardized reading measure indicated a tendency for poorer readers to show a greater contextual facilitation effect, a result consistent with previous research (Biemiller, 1977(Biemiller, -1978Schvaneveldt, Ackerman, & Semlear, 1977). In addition, a significant contextual inhibition effect (longer naming This research was supported by an Oakland University faculty research grant. The authors would like to thank Mike Seiler, Ann Cunningharn-DiPaolo, and Dale Hansen for assistanoe in data collection. James H. Neely made extensive and insightful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript and the authors are grateful for his contribution. The authors also wish to thank Paula J. Stanovich for providing technical assistance. Requests for reprints should be sent to Keith E. Stanovich, Department of Psychology, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan 48063. times in the incongruous context condition than in the no-eontext condition) was found for both fourth-grade and sixth-grade subjects, but not for adults. In the latter group, mean naming times were virtually identieal in the no-context and incongruous eonditions.The pattern of results in the West and Stanovich (1978) study fits rather nicely within the framework of the ...

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Section: It Should Be Noted That the Context By Stimulusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: It Should Be Noted That the Context By Stimulusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mechanisms of sentence context effects in reading: Automatic activation and conscious attention

1979

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“…It was found that the good, younger readers scored significantly better than the poor, older readers on two measures of syntacticawareness, one an oral doze task and the other an oral correction task. The findings suggest that the older, poor readers weredevelopmentally delayed in syntacticawareness and that this delay may have retarded reading development.The ability of young children to produce the missing words in visually or orally presented sentences is related to their reading comprehension performance (Bickley et al, 1970;Perfetti & Roth, 1981;Ryan & Ledger, 1984). However, the word recognition ability of good readers while processing sentences is less dependent on prior context than that of poor readers (Stanovich, 1982a).…”

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confidence: 99%

Syntactic awareness and reading acquisition

Tunmer¹,

Nesdale²,

Wright³

1987

British J of Dev Psycho

135

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25Although previous studies have demonstrated that syntacticawareness is related to beginning reading achievement, the direction of causation remains a matter of dispute. Our study employed a reading level design in which good, younger readers were matched with poor, older readers on four measures of reading ability (real word recognition, pseudo-word naming, reading fluency, and reading comprehension) and verbal intelligence. It was found that the good, younger readers scored significantly better than the poor, older readers on two measures of syntacticawareness, one an oral doze task and the other an oral correction task. The findings suggest that the older, poor readers weredevelopmentally delayed in syntacticawareness and that this delay may have retarded reading development.The ability of young children to produce the missing words in visually or orally presented sentences is related to their reading comprehension performance (Bickley et al., 1970;Perfetti & Roth, 1981;Ryan & Ledger, 1984). However, the word recognition ability of good readers while processing sentences is less dependent on prior context than that of poor readers (Stanovich, 1982a). It appears that the superior decoding skills of the better readers makes reliance on contextual information largely unnecessary. Perfetti et al. (1979) found that skilled readers who displayed smaller context effects in a word recognition task were nevertheless better than less skilled readers at using context to predict words in written and oral doze tasks. The correlation between word recognition performance and number of correct predictions was 0·60. This raises the question, however, of why better predictive abilities are associated with greater reading proficiency.One possibility is that the poorer performance of less skilled readers on doze tasks is a consequence of their difficulty in learning to read. Having successfully learned to read, good readers receive greater exposure to written language. This in turn results in the development and practice of their verbal abilities, rendering them superior to less-skilled readers on tasks involving verbal materials. Another possibility, which is investigated in this study, is that the doze task constitutes a measure of syntactic awareness and that this ability is causally related to learning to read.By syntactic awareness we mean the child's ability to reflect upon and to manipulate aspects of the internal grammatical structure of sentences. It is one of several general types of metalinguistic ability, a developmentally distinct kind of linguistic functioning which emerges during middle childhood and which is thought to be related to the more general changes in information-processing capabilities that occur during this period (Hakes et al

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“…The other technique is the cloze-technique, i.e., the deletion of certain words in some regular manner from a passage and substituting underlined blank spaces. Cloze was first recommended by Taylor (1953) as a method of measuring readability, but it has also been researched as a teaching technique (Bickley, Ellington, and Bickley, 1970;Jongsma, 1971).…”

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confidence: 98%

Manipulation of Attention during Reading Using Programmed Prose

Carver

1975

Journal of Reading Behavior

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Programmed prose, a new technique similar in some ways to the cloze technique, was investigated as a method for manipulating attention during reading. It was anticipated that programmed prose would act to increase attention in low motivation conditions, where attention would be expected to wane, and thereby facilitate learning. It was also expected that programmed prose would act as a distractor under high motivation conditions, where attention would not be expected to wane, and thereby inhibit learning. Fifty-eight college students were presented a 1720 word passage to read. Two groups received the passage in a regular prose format. One of these groups was told they would be paid on the basis of how well they did on the retention test. Two other groups received the passage in a programmed prose format. One of these two groups was also told that they would be paid on the basis of how well they did on the retention test. The programmed prose facilitated learning under the low motivation conditions and inhibited learning under the high motivation condition, as had been anticipated.

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The Cloze Procedure: A Conspectus

Cited by 40 publications

References 37 publications

Mechanisms of sentence context effects in reading: Automatic activation and conscious attention

Mechanisms of sentence context effects in reading: Automatic activation and conscious attention

Syntactic awareness and reading acquisition

Manipulation of Attention during Reading Using Programmed Prose

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