ROLE OF THE COGNITIVE INTERNAL STATE LEXICON IN READING-COMPREHENSION

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