Few previous studies have directly linked the contribution of phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) to the development of phonological processing and orthographic processing in reading. These studies are predominantly cross-sectional and focus on reading development predictors, with relatively little emphasis on spelling…

The author reviews theory and research by Ehri and her colleagues to document how a scientific approach has been applied over the years to conduct controlled studies whose findings reveal how beginners learn to read words in and out of text. Words may be read by decoding letters into blended sounds or by predicting words from context, but the way…

Recently, there has been growing concern about how to most effectively support the literacy development of beginning and struggling readers with regard to helping them learn to effortlessly identify the huge number of words that proficient readers ultimately learn to read with automaticity. Some, noting the critical importance of phonics…

The present study investigated the relation among reading skills and attributions, naming speed, and phonological awareness across a wide range of reading skill. Participants were 1,105 school-age children and youths from two understudied populations: African Americans and Hispanic Americans. Individual assessments of children ranging in age from…

Practitioners are increasingly expected to provide reading instruction to students with intellectual disabilities to help them become literate. Whereas explicit, systematic reading instruction is effective at preventing reading difficulties for most young children, its effectiveness for children with intellectual disabilities remains unclear. The…

Compares the abilities of good and poor readers in the second through fifth grades to read a frequency-graduated series of irregularly spelled words presented in isolation and in meaningful context, noting that the number of correctly read words varied with reading ability. (HOD)

Kindergarten students were taught words with or without pictures to test the focal attention hypothesis that pictures interfere with sight-word learning. In this study, pictures presented with words facilitated rather than hindered learning. (MKM)

Examines the word-reading strategies of a sample of second- and third-grade students in normal classrooms, focusing on the students' relative reliance on decoding versus sight-word associations. Suggests that lack of efficient decoding skills will begin to take a toll on reading comprehension by grade 3. (SR)

Analyzes a report by D.D. Steinberg and J. Yamada that investigated which of the different types of scripts used in Japanese writing was the easiest to learn to read. (MKM)

Offers a rebuttal to Tzeng and Singer's criticism of the authors' study of the ease of learning to read the different Japanese scripts. States that the symbols and words were taught in the ordinary situation in which they are learned. (MKM)

Investigates differences in performance on a task involving judgments of word-likeness between a group of reading-disabled children and normal readers matched to them either in reading level or age. Shows that although the knowledge of orthographic structure of reading-disabled children matches that of younger normal readers, reading-disabled…