This study investigated reading skills in 41 children with autism spectrum disorder. Four components of reading skill were assessed: word recognition, nonword decoding, text reading accuracy and text comprehension. Overall, levels of word and nonword reading and text reading accuracy fell within average range although reading comprehension was…

Both psychologists and reading specialists have been interested in whether words are processed letter by letter or in larger units. A reaction time paradigm was used to evaluate these options with interest focused on potential units of word recognition which might be functional within single syllable words. The basic paradigm involved presenting…

Fifteen children ages 7 to 9 years who had persistent reading difficulties despite adequate instruction were provided with intensive tutorial interventions. The interventions targeted deficient phonological processing and decoding skills for 8 weeks (2 hours per day) followed by an 8-week, 1-hour-per-day intervention that focused on the…

The present findings are drawn from the Jyvaskyla Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (JLD), in which approximately 100 children with familial risk of dyslexia and 100 control children have been followed from birth. In this paper we report data on the reading development of the JLD children and their classmates, a total of 1,750 children from four…

This article assesses the state of the literature on word-attack skills and phonological awareness (PA) in individuals with mental retardation, in light of progress towards the development of effective teaching procedures. The literature contains promising findings. Studies have shown PA to be correlated with word-attack skills in individuals with…

The aim of this study was to determine whether explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding skills would be an effective intervention strategy for children with early reading difficulties in a whole language instructional environment. Twenty-four 6- and 7-year-old struggling readers were randomly assigned to an…

A semantic priming procedure was employed to test the hypothesis that children differing in word-decoding skill differentially use context to facilitate word identification. (Author/DB)

Reports that in a word naming experiment, experienced readers of Persian named high frequency transparent Persian words significantly faster than matched low frequency words. Finds no such effects for adults who had, for 10 years, little experience in reading Persian due to emigration to the West; overall, previously experienced adults named words…

Investigates whether readers of Turkish (which has a simple relation between spelling and sound) depend more on decoding for word recognition than readers of English (which has an "opaque" orthography). Suggests that readers become less dependent on phonological mediation with experience and that this reduction is more rapid for readers of opaque…

A model of word recognition is proposed that assumes that, when a word is encountered, the first available orthographic code activates all lexical entries that are positionally equivalent with that information (the word's "cohort"). The model is explained relative to encoding and the complex orthographic unit termed a wickelgraph. (SLD)

The influence of orthography on children's on-line auditory word recognition was studied from the end of Grade 2 to the end of Grade 4, by examining the orthographic consistency effect [Ziegler, J. C., & Ferrand, L. (1998). Orthography shapes the perception of speech: The consistency effect in auditory recognition. "Psychonomic Bulletin & Review",…

This study examined the status of current reading, spelling, and phonological processing skills of 28 university students who reported a history of reading acquisition problems. The results indicated that 21 of these participants were currently able to comprehend text at a level expected for university students, although only 8 at a rate…

In order to have both fluent reading and good comprehension, the student must be brought beyond accuracy to automaticity in decoding. (JH)

The effects of contextual words upon the identification of test words in sentences were studied with 21 hearing impaired children (seven to 12 years old). Significantly more correct discriminations were made on congruous and neutral sentences than on incongruous sentences indicating that hearing impaired children use contextual cues. (Author/SEW)

Reading disabled adolescents with specific learning disabilities were compared to normal adolescent readers and young normal readers (total N=48). Results showed that context facilitated both decoding and meaning recognition for normal readers, and reading disabled adolescents showed deficits on both tasks. (Author/CL)