Confirms previous findings that young children do not have an adequate concept of what constitutes the spoken "word." (RB)

Finds that orthographic information dominated word recognition of both good and poor readers and that both semantic contexts and text difficulty influenced the reading of target words. Shows that good readers used orthographic information more than did poor readers, whereas poor readers used semantic context more than good readers. Finds support…

Examines three experiments about how readers combine immediate sentence context with information presented earlier in a paragraph in processing words in text. Finds that discourse information operates interactively with local context to affect readers' expectations for and processing of upcoming words. (MG)

Examines literacy development among a group of preschool and kindergarten children through changes in the form, function, and perception of their written names. Studies 67 3-, 4-, and 5-year olds, their teachers, instructional aides, and 6 case-study parents participating in a yearlong analysis. Concludes that "name" has the…

Confirms the hypothesis that readers mediate the identification of unfamiliar words by comparing the unknown word to known words and parts. (RB)

Contains a response to Harry Singer's comments (see EJ 217 553) about a previous article in this journal on focal attention by M. Arlin, M. Scott, and J. Webster (see EJ 206 153). Attempts to show that Singer's statements in the critique reflect some errors and misconceptions. (MKM)

Examines the effects of onset and rime awareness on children's recognition of spelling patterns in written words. Reports that onset-rime awareness was associated with word ending similarities, whereas word beginning analogies appeared to involve higher-level phonological skills. Suggests longitudinal research regarding the issue. (SG)

Concludes that subjects' success in deriving the meanings of unfamiliar words was affected by prior experience with related words and by the strength of the surrounding sentence contexts, but that they did not combine the two information sources to yield higher vocabulary scores than obtained with either source by itself. (FL)

Concludes that substituting easy for difficult vocabulary words makes text easier to comprehend, and that redundant information in a text contributes to successful text comprehension. (AEA)

Reports on a study that examined patterns and interrelationships in the development of print awareness over the preschool years with results indicating that preschool children do not acquire such skills and concepts in a fixed order. (MKM)

Finds that Japanese fifth graders' naming speed was a good indicator of the automaticity of the lexical access for both syllabaries and morphograms, but that skilled/less-skilled differences in vocalization latencies were greater for real words than for pseudowords for both hiragana and kanji. Discusses the applicability of C. A. Perfetti's verbal…

Investigates whether orthographic processing ability in adults accounts for variance in individual word recognition and spelling skills. Finds that some individual differences in reading and spelling are caused by variation in orthographic processing skills linked to print exposure. (RS)

Leveled books originally selected by or produced for use in Reading Recovery or its regular classroom initiative are now also widely used in regular and special classrooms having no affiliation with Reading Recovery. The frequent use of these leveled books in settings other than Reading Recovery raises an important question: Do books leveled for…