ROLE OF THE COGNITIVE INTERNAL STATE LEXICON IN READING-COMPREHENSION

Cognitive internal state words (e.g., think and know) may be central to accessing, monitoring, and transforming our internal states, processes that seem to be critical for high-level text understanding (e.g., E. K. Scholnick & W. S. Hall, 1991). Fifth graders, 10th graders, and college undergraduates participated in this study of the importance of cognitive words in skilled reading comprehension. Positive correlations with cognitive word knowledge were significantly higher for verbal (vocabulary and reading comprehension) than for quantitative achievement percentiles. The order of acquisition of cognitive words depended on a complex interaction among frequency of the replacement cognitive word in established word frequency counts, the level of meaning as determined by the R. E. Frank and W. S. Hall (1991) conceptual difficulty hierarchy and whether the cognitive word was a cognate of think or know.