This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 24 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the influence of additional supportive context upon the reader's ability to identify the main idea of a paragraph; effects of metaphors and paraphrases as encodings of verbal information; conceptual background knowledge and young children's comprehension of discourse; semantic response latency and three long-term memory models; developmental aspects of reading comprehension readiness; a predictive model of prose processing; metaphors; the interference of some anaphoric expressions on reading comprehension; differential processing of auditory and visual information in lingustic and nonlinguistic forms; the effects of readability and directed stopping on the learning and enjoyment of technical material; memory in young children; verbal labels and the organization and retention of a series of movements in memory; interspersed organizers and comprehension of written prose; on-task adaptation of imagery with its verbal elaborations as adjuncts for prose learning; visual and symbolic representation in alphabetic letter recognition; reading and the comprehension of a text; the relationship between recognition and recall; readability and top-level structure; and paragraph structural explicitness and main idea comprehension of college students with varying abilities. (FL)