Ninety-three first grade children participated in a study that examined the relationship among instructional materials, other factors such as test scores, and the growth and application of letter-sound correspondence knowledge. The study also sought to determine the importance of letter-sound correspondence knowledge in the acquisition and…

A twelve-hour spelling class was held over one weekend at California State University, Dominguez Hills. During this course, students were helped to discover their own spelling difficulties and were introduced to a wide variety of materials and strategies, including spelling nonsense words, effective dictionary use, vocabulary building, the study…

The phenomenon of "invented spelling" in young children, observed in many preschool age children who produce written messages using words that are generated through an original system of orthography, was researched with Spanish-speaking children. The following conclusions were made from previous research with English-speaking children concerning…

This study focuses on the relationship between blending ability and reading comprehension among 80 prereading children from three private preschools. Three methods of instruction were tested: One group was instructed with an auditory method; the second group was instructed with an auditory-visual method; and the third group practiced the basic set…

It has been reported (Terrell 1974) that in Cuban Spanish word-final /s/ aspiration is generally not affected by grammatical constraints, except for determiners in prevocalic environments. However, deletion of /s/, according to Terrell, is correlated with morphological classes and grammatical function, and is constrained by functional…

An interactive/cognitive model can account for the acquisition of a graphophonemic system by young children and be compatible with the cuing explanation, which posits that readers use their graphophonemic knowledge in coordination with their knowledge of language and the world to make sense of print. Explanations in the research literature of how…

Traditionally, reading instruction has emphasized the visual-sound correspondences in language. The illusion that words can be "sounded-out" letter by letter and word by word to produce meaning needs to be re-evaluated according to the psycholinguistic nature of the reading process. Some nonvisual aspects of reading which are…

A study was designed to investigate the auditory-visual integrative abilities of primary grade children for five long vowels and five short vowels. The Vowel Integration Test (VIT), composed of 35 nonsense words having all the long and short vowel sounds, was administered to students in 64 schools over a period of two years. Students' indications…

This review of the literature on reading theories is built around three components: an explication of each theory, an evaluation of the theory based on an examination of its internal and external coherence and correspondence, and an application of the theory to a child's reading. The literature is organized around discussions of 12 benchmarks…

This paper examines the phenomenon of final consonant deletion in clusters which do not agree in voicing and compares this phenomenon with clusters sharing the voicing feature. The speech studied is that of Puerto Rican and black Harlem teenagers. The data reported here refutes many of Bailey's (1972) claims. Clusters where voicing is not shared…

This paper focuses on linguistic prosodic units related to boundaries between syntactic units. Specifically, rules for predicting the location of such boundaries, and factors affecting their location, are discussed. Examples are given on how prosodies can be used for syntactic analysis. Addressing the question of prosodic units and their…

It is upon a positive literature-based foundation that educators must build excellent curriculum and teaching strategies. It is the job of educators to be trained to integrate the concepts of whole language and direct phonetic instruction so children have the advantage of both schools of thought, to be aware of how children learn most efficiently,…

A study examined the differences in the appreciation of language ambiguity as represented in the word play of children aged 6 through 11 years. In six weekly play sessions, students were read stories containing many lexical ambiguities and pictures and were invited to verbalize and to draw similar ambiguities. Criteria necessary to the…

Most word learning studies conducted over the past decade have shown that methods of word instruction that emphasize the graphic or phonic features of words presented alone (word alone method) affect learning rate more positively than do methods that emphasize meaning through oral, written, and pictorial cues (context methods). To compare the…

The eight popular commercial reading programs examined in this study were selected on the basis of their use with compensatory education students and the fact that they represent different instructional approaches. The study examined how readers are taught to break the letter/sound code, what correspondences are taught, and how correspondences are…