The self-teaching hypothesis describes how children progress toward skilled sight-word reading. It proposes that children do this via phonological recoding with assistance from contextual cues, to identify the target pronunciation for a novel letter string, and in so doing create an opportunity to self-teach new orthographic knowledge. We present…

The lexical decision (LD) and naming (NAM) tasks are ubiquitous paradigms that employ printed word identification. They are major tools for investigating how factors like morphology, semantic information, lexical neighborhood and others affect identification. Although use of the tasks is widespread, there has been little research into how…

The ability to extract visual word forms quickly and efficiently is essential for using reading as a tool for learning. We describe the first longitudinal fMRI study to chart individual changes in cortical sensitivity to written words as reading develops. We conducted four annual measurements of brain function and reading skills in a heterogeneous…

Introduction: The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of reading racetracks and direct instruction flashcards with two students with behavior disorders. A token economy with a response cost component was also implemented to increase on-task behavior during data collection. Method: The participants were two eight-year-old males.…

A fiercely contested debate in teaching reading concerns the respective roles and merits of reading schemes and real books. Underpinning the controversy are different philosophies and beliefs about how children learn to read. However, to some extent debates have largely been rhetoric-driven, rather than research-driven. This article provides a…

Sight word learning and memory were studied to clarify how early during development readers process visual letter patterns that are not dictated by phonology, and whether their word learning is influenced by the legality of letter patterns. Forty kindergartners and first graders were taught to read 12 words containing either single consonants…

Sight word lists have been used since prior to 20 B.C. and have changed forms many times. Today sight word lists are numerous and are widely and variously used. They differ in source, intended purpose and/or audience, and criteria for including specific words. Despite the differences, there is much agreement that they do reflect the most basic…

The purpose of this study was to compare student's tested recognition of the Dolch 220 words with their responses to the 220 highest frequency words found by Kucera and Francis in their "Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English." Subjects consisted of 155 second graders and 179 third graders from classrooms in four schools…

This study replicated and validated the Dolch basic sight vocabulary investigation. Dolch's method of compiling his list of 95 nouns was also replicated. Some discrepancies were found between the replication study and Dolch's investigations--a few words were left off the lists, although they apparently met all the criteria for inclusion, and a…

This paper compares a recent revision of the Dolch Basic Sight Vocabulary with four recently published word lists to find words common to at least three of the four word lists which were not on the Dolch list. These lists were consisted of the 500 most frequent words from the American Heritage Intermediate corpus, the 188 high frequency words from…

The present research investigated the relationship between Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) performance, letter-string reading measures of sight vocabulary (SV) and phonetic decoding (PD), and lexical decision. Criterion-based naming rates were obtained from three types of RAN tasks: digits, letters, and letter sounds. Latency measures were obtained…

Volume 1 of the final report of Project FAST consists of reports on 13 experiments concerning: (1) the application of associative learning strategies to the development of a basic sight vocabulary among mentally retarded children and adults, and (2) the development of text reduction techniques designed to facilitate comprehension and recall of…

This practicum was developed (1) to improve, supervise, and disseminate a model cross-age tutoring program, and (2) to determine if a tutorial program would increase the sight vocabulary of 100 second grade students in the Dallas Independent School District. A secondary purpose was to determine if such a program would improve the reading grades,…