ABSTRACT
At this moment, there are many promising research efforts on the relation of language structure to the comprehension of prose. Considerable attention has been paid to the comprehension of simple, relatively stereotyped units such as folk tales (Colby, 1973), problem instructions (Hayes & Simon, 1974), and simple narratives (Kintsch, this volume; Kintsch & van Dijk, 1975; Rumelhart, 1975). In this paper, we will present data on the comprehension of those popular 20th century fables called algebra word problems.
