Background: Some children with severe learning difficulties fail to begin word recognition. For these children there is a need for an effective and appropriate pedagogy. However, conflicting advice can be found regarding this derived from teaching approaches that are not based on a shared understanding of how reading develops or the skills that…

Research on incidental second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition through reading has claimed that repeated encounters with unfamiliar words and the relative elaboration of processing these words facilitate word learning. However, so far both variables have been investigated in isolation. To help close this research gap, the current study…

Background: Children with word-finding difficulties manifest a high frequency of word-finding characteristics in narrative, yet word-finding interventions have concentrated on single-word treatments and outcome measures. Aims: This study measured the effectiveness of a narrative-based intervention in improving single-word picture-naming and…

The present study investigated the effects of using an assistive software homophone tool on the assisted proofreading performance and unassisted basic skills of secondary-level students with reading difficulties. Students aged 13 to 15 years proofread passages for homophonic errors under three conditions: with the homophone tool, with homophones…

Recent theories of morphological processing have been dominated by the notion that morphologically complex words are decomposed into their constituents on the basis of their semantic properties. In this article we argue that the weight of evidence now suggests that the recognition of morphologically complex words begins with a rapid morphemic…

The role of phonology-to-spelling consistency (i.e., "feedback consistency") was investigated in 3 lexical decision experiments in both the visual and auditory modalities in French and English. No evidence for a feedback consistency effect was found in the visual modality, either in English or in French, despite the fact that consistency…

In this study, teaching assistants (TAs) were trained to spend 4 min each day on a precision teaching programme with selected pupils, whose progress in word recognition was a cause for concern. Words were taken from "The National Literacy Strategy Framework for Schools". The sessions were set up to be "fun" times. All the…

There is now a renewed emphasis in the UK on short intensive interventions to tackle reading failure. In this paper we report on the effect of a programme based on a view that reading problems are associated with the inability of the learner to deal with speech at the level of individual speech sounds even though they may be fully competent in the…

This article takes up the proposal, originally postulated by George Miller in the US (Miller, 1969) and later taken up by Harry Kay in the UK (Kay, 1972), that psychologists should work through non-psychologists to help alleviate social problems. Specifically it evaluates a reading intervention programme devised by educational psychologists and…

Investigates the relation between comprehension skill and the ability to locate information. Results reveal that good comprehenders were more efficient than poor comprehenders when they were required to locate specific pieces of information in a text. Findings suggest that good comprehenders' superior search strategy may arise because of their…

Investigated the most popular synonym for each word in a pair. Subjects (N=100) in two groups produced the noun they felt was closest in meaning to each of 279 nouns. Tables are provided showing the preferred synonym and number of subjects using it and comparisons to a previous experiment. (Author/JAC)

Results from a representative sample of 123 adults in the United Kingdom tested with the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised and a test of word identification time are in line with previous findings that speed of information processing is significantly related to performance IQ but not to verbal IQ. (SLD)

Two experiments assessed masked priming for words presented to the left and right visual fields in a lexical decision task. In both Experiments, the same magnitude and pattern of priming was obtained for visually similar ("kiss"-"KISS") and dissimilar ("read"-"READ") prime-target pairs. These findings…

Claims that even though teaching phonics is an effective method of reading instruction, the skills taught by phonics have little to do with the process of reading acquisition. Offers two methods of resolving the paradoxes generated by this situation. (NH)

We use a genetically sensitive design to examine the relationship between language and nonverbal ability at 4 and a half and reading skills at 7 years of age in a sample of more than 1,000 children participating in the Twins Early Development Study. We find that nonphonological as well as phonological measures of early language make significant…