Investigates how well kindergarten phonological awareness (PA) and naming speed (NS) account for reading development to Grade 5. PA was most strongly related to reading in the first two years of school, and NS's initially weaker relationship increased with grade level. Children with weak PA and slow NS were most likely to develop reading…

Addresses the question of the role of general speed/rate of processing in reading impairment in adults. Compares 95 adults varying in word-recognition ability. Shows significant and pervasive speed/rate differences among groups, as well as differences in accuracy performance. (SG)

Tests hypotheses that reading styles of good spellers and dysgraphic spellers differs. Concludes that an underlying source of difficulty for dysgraphic spellers, one that may be related to the reading style they exhibit, is a more limited working memory capacity. (MS)

A study analyzed the relation of four information presentation methods--text, tabular, black-and-white graphics, and color graphics--to level of retention, reader reaction, and reading time. Results confirmed that the incorporation of color graphics in a document increases psychological reaction, but does not necessarily improve task performance.…

Previous research has been inconsistent in supporting any one model of idiom comprehension. This study found evidence of the effect of familiarity on reading times for sentences containing idioms, as well as new evidence that literalness affects reading times and that both familiarity and literalness exert interactive effects. (22 references)…

Discusses a study of fast and slow adult readers' textual organization subprocesses. Reveals that title and text type variables were manipulated in the study. Concludes that fast and slow readers processed textual organization similarly and showed identical comprehension performances. Calls for research into the characteristics of good…

Reviews research on lexical access (the process of getting information about a word from a mental dictionary). Discusses implications for comprehension development. Suggests that individual differences in comprehension depend on speed of lexical access as well as on speed of decoding. (SR)

Video segments captioned at different speeds were shown to a group of 578 people (ages 8 to 80) who are deaf, hard of hearing, or typically hearing. The most comfortable speed was found to be about 145 words per minute (WPM), close to the 141 WPM mean rate actually found in television programs. (Author/CR)

This Australian study compared effects of relative-size magnification and relative-distance magnification on the reading rates of 24 adults with normal vision and 22 adults with low vision. For the subjects with low vision, the magnification method did not affect their reading rates, although subjects with normal vision showed slower reading at…

Measured both reading speeds and comprehension in two groups of learners exposed to intensive and extensive reading programs. The extensive group was exposed to a regime of graded readers, while the intensive group studied short texts followed by comprehension questions. Results indicate that subjects exposed to extensive reading achieved both…

Three tables present data from 22 braille-reading blind children, ages 6 to 12, including demographic data (such as years of braille use, IQ, age, hand movement type, and reading rate); highest and lowest reading rates, by years of braille instruction and IQ scores; and oral reading rates. The methodology used is suggested for teachers doing…

Investigates whether two groups of 6-year-old beginning readers taught to read by a phonics and by a "book experience" non-phonics approach would differ in reading comprehension as well as the processes of word recognition. Finds that the non-phonics approach taught children much faster reading reaction times to familiar words but they scored…

This study compared the effects of two different listening while reading (LWR) rates on words correct per minute, accuracy, generalization, and comprehension for four 4th- and 5th-graders. It was hypothesized the effects of LWR would increase as the rate of LWR more closely approximated the reader's actual oral reading rate. An alternating…

This edition of "NAEPFacts" highlights findings from the first attempt by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to measure elementary students' oral reading on a large scale. This article presents data on 1,136 fourth graders' oral fluency and its relationship to 3 other aspects of reading ability: comprehension,…

A study examined the relative effectiveness of repeated readings and listening-while-reading in promoting reading fluency. Subjects, 20 third grade students in a community in the southeastern United States, of high, average, and low reading levels, had their reading fluency measured in two cycles: subjects who repeatedly read a passage in the…