Relationship of Reading Comprehension to the Cognitive Internal State Lexicon. Reading Research Report No. 14.

The authors compared fifth-, seventh-, and tenth-graders, and college undergraduates’ cognitive word knowledge of the cognates of think and know within a theoretical framework focused on hierarchical levels of meaning. Cognitive words form a category within the internal state lexicon and may be central to accessing, monitoring, and transforming our internal states, all of which seem to be processes critical to reading comprehension. Cognitive word knowledge was positively correlated with achievement scores. The correlations with cognitive word knowledge were higher for Verbal (vocabulary and reading comprehension) than Quantitative achievement scores, and cognitive word knowledge increased with age. However, the order of acquisition of cognitive words depended on a complex interaction between the frequency of the cognitive word in established word frequency counts, the level of meaning as determined by the conceptual difftculty hierarchy, and whether the cognitive word was a cognate of think or know. Cognitive words such as think and know form a category within the internal state lexicon (Hall & Nagy, 1986) and may be central to accessing, monitoring, and transforming our internal states (Scholnick & Hall, 1991). Many cognitive words are polysemous and can be defined along a hierarchy from simpleperception to complex planning (Frank & Hall, 1991; Hall, Scholnick, & Hughes, 1987). According to this hierarchy, the higher the level of meaningthe more conceptually demandingthe more internal processing is required. We argue that cognitive words may be centrally involved in the development of skilled reading comprehension. Cognitive words can provide a medium that makes it possible to engage in metacognitive acts relevant to the reading process, such as generating a goal for reading, communicating the intended meaning of a text, and evaluating one’s level of understanding. Similarly, cognitive words can equip the reader with a vehicle by which to evaluate different comprehension strategies critically or to reflect on the logical organization and interdependence of the com2 James R. Booth & William S. Hall ponents of a text. Our elaborated cognitive word lexicon allows us to make fine-grained distinctions between cognitive states. Cognitive words “convey shades of meaning which add succinctness and precision to the lexicon” and supply us with “a greater capacity for description and definition” (Corson, 1985, p. 61). While skilled reading comprehension requires the use of all of the aforementioned skills, direct empirical evidence for the claim that cognitive word knowledge is central to the development of reading comprehension is sparse (see Olson & Torrance, 1986, 1987). The present study sought to remedy this situation by providing an empirical test of the hypothesized relationship between cognitive word knowledge and reading comprehension. In pursuit of this aim, a task was designed to measure knowledge of the cognates of think and know while simultaneously varying the dimensions of established frequency in the English language (Carroll, Richman, & Davies, 1971) and the level of meaning difficulty (Frank & Hall, 1991). The degree of children’s knowledge of these cognitive words was expected to correlate highly with reading achievement scores. Certain cognitive words, such as think and know, appear very early in a child’s lexicon. Children begin to use cognitive words at about three years of age (Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982), but their use remains infrequent and limited primarily to pragmatic functions. For example, Shatz, Wellman, and Silber (1983) found that the earliest use of cognitive words is for pragmatic or conversational purposes, such as in directing the action. By the end of their third year, children begin to use cognitive words in a way that suggests semantic understanding (Shatz et al., 1983), but they do not understand the distinctions between many cognitive words, such as remember, know, and guess, until approximately four years of age (Johnson & Wellman, 1980). At around five years of age, children can differentiate between know and think (Johnson & Maratsos, 1977; Moore, Bryant, & Furrow, 1989), know and guess (Miscione, Marvin, O’Brien, & Greenberg, 1978; Moore et al. 1989), and remember and forget (Johnson, 1981). Fine-grained distinctions between other cognitive words are not learned until later. Seven-year-olds’ judgment of the truth of the complement of the cognitive words pretend, know, and think are determined primarily by the plausibility of the complement and only secondarily by the factivity of the verb (Olson & Torrance, 1986); the think and guess distinction is not attained until children are eight years old (Moore et al., 1989). Furthermore, children do not understand believe, which can be both factive and nonfactive, until after age seven (Abbeduto & Rosenberg, 1985), and even high school and college students have incomplete knowledge of more complex cognitive words such as predict, interpret, infer, conclude, and assume (Astington & Olson, 1990). All cognitive words are not acquired simultaneously, in part because certain cognitive words differ semantically in specific but subtle respects. For example, know, remember, forget, and guess refer to the accessibility of knowledge (Hall et al., 1987); pretend, guess, and know involve presuppositions of disbelief, uncertainty, and belief (Macnamara, Baker, & Olson, 1976); see and know refer to internal versus external experience (Wellman & Estes, NATIONAL READING RESEARCH CENTER, READING RESEARCH REPORT NO. 14 Reading Comprehension and Cognitive Words 3 1987). The development of the internal state lexicon is a gradual, incremental process that depends on the particular cognitive words to be learned. An example of this dependence is that many cognitive words are polysemous, that is, they have more than one meaning. This polysemy imposes a constraint on children’s acquisition of cognitive words. Hierarchy of Meaning of Cognitive Words Frank and Hall (1991) proposed that certain cognitive words have a hierarchy of level of meaning characterized by increasing abstractness and conceptual difficulty (see also Hall et al., 1987). They proposed that the cognitive internal state lexicon adheres to a structure that involves the following levels: (1) registering an experience perceptually; (2) determining the familiarity of an experience and embedding it in a factual network; (3) understanding interconnections among concepts; (4) making one’s presuppositions about the experience explicit; (5) commenting on how internal processing is being done; and (6) assessing future intention, which implies an understanding and integration of past events. They referred to these levels as perception, memory, understanding, evaluation, metacognition, and planning, respectively. It was proposed that perception is the least complex and requires a limited amount of internal processing, whileplanning is the most complex and demands the greatest amount of internal processing. The middle levels of meaning follow a hierarchy of increasing conceptual difficulty between these endpoints. Frank and Hall (1991) hypothesized that the higher the level of meaning for a word, the less it is likely to be used in discourse. Indeed, they found that as the level of meaning increased, the frequency decreased for both adult and child verbal frequency of the cognitive word know. Although, the levels of perception, memory, and understanding were statistically differentiated, the levels of evaluation, metacognition, and planning were not. Hughes (1985) obtained similar results in a comprehension task assessing cognitive word knowledge in three-, six-, and nine-year-old children. Frank and Hall (1991) then tried to incorporate the cognitive word think into their level of meaning hierarchy. They found that evaluation was used most often and that the other five levels of meaning were statistically undifferentiated for both children and adults. On the basis of these findings, they proposed that cognitive words are organized hierarchically, but that different cognitive words may have a different organization of levels that depends on both conceptual difficulty and prototypicality. According to their hypothesis, prototypical meanings will be acquired first, but cognitive words whose prototypical meanings are of a lower level will be semantically mastered earlier than words whose prototypical meanings are of a higher level. This claim is supported by lindings from an analysis of young children who used know before think more frequently in natural discourse (Hall, Nagy, & Linn, 1984). Know may have a lower level prototypical meaning than think. Certain cognitive words have several pragmatic as well as semantic functions, and this may encourage children to develop metalinguistic knowledge. A semantic use of a cognitive word occurs when it contributes directly to the intended meaning of an utterance, such as “Sally knows the answer. ” In contrast, a pragNATlONAL READING RESEARCH CENTER, READING RESEARCH REPORT NO. 14 4 James R. Booth & William S. Hall matic use contributes indirectly, if at all, to the meaning of an utterance; it might be a hedge, a conversational device, an indirect request, or an attention-getting device such as “You know, I need to go to the store” (Hall & Nagy, 1986). Cognitive words appear to have more meanings and functions than words that name objects, events, or situations. Because the contexts in which people use cognitive words vary, exposure to cognitive words may be particularly advantageous in the development of metalinguistic abilities. For example, when a child realizes that a word is only a symbol for its referent, that context determines the polysemous nature of words, and that language can be an object of thought, his or her linguistic ability is advanced considerably. Also, children are likely to generalize this knowledge of multiple meanings to other lexical domai