This case study documents the emergence of reading ability in an extremely precocious reader between the ages of two years, seven months and three years, two months. At the end of this period, his word recognition ability was at the late first-grade level. Writing skills began to develop when he was four years old. (DB)

Two blending strategies for decoding words (pausing and not pausing between successive sounds) were compared with nine preschool children. Once mastered, segmenting by not pausing engendered high and sustained levels of word identification. Other findings indicated that sound identification abilities were necessary but not sufficient for decoding.…

Focuses on the effect of word-recognition instruction on later reading success for all students, particularly students experiencing difficulties with early reading. Instructional principles are offered for teaching essential elements of word recognition: letter-sound correspondence, regular word reading, story reading, irregular word reading, and…

Reports on a study of Grade 5 children who had been trained in phoneme identity six years earlier. Results reveal that these children were superior to untrained controls on irregular word reading and on a composite list of nonwords, regular words, and irregular words. Preschool instruction in phonemic structure had modest but detectable effects on…

A study examined the training of students to use context clues more effectively. Subjects were five fifth and sixth grade remedial students identified as low verbal students. The subjects were met with individually for 9 sessions of approximately 30 minutes each, prior to or following the school day. Two sessions were devoted to testing and seven…

Two longitudinal studies examined a "double deficit" hypothesis of reading disorders that contends that along with a core phonological deficit, slow speed of lexical access disrupts the efficient formation of orthographic representations and their quick retrieval. In the first study, 38 children from 6 classrooms in a predominantly white, middle…

Numerous reviews of the experimental research conclude that phonics is indispensable in word recognition instruction. However, there have been numerous objections to phonics teaching over the years. Some of the intolerance of phonics teaching reflects a lack of knowledge about the subject. Critics suggest that phonics hinders children's learning…

One model of interactive processing useful in describing word identification processes in discourse context is of a weakly interactive type. This type assumes that the time to identify a word in context is an activation function, whereas the time to activate a word in memory beyond some criterial identification threshold is a multiplicative…

To whet the curiosity and interest of teachers who may be frustrated with the reading vocabulary achievement of pupils, an informal study compared Piaget's cognitive development theory, recent brain research, and the reading process, and examined how the theory and research apply to reading instruction. The Gestalt Process Approach to teaching…

The debate between the whole language approach and the word-centered skills approach to beginning reading instruction is likely to continue into the next decade, so it seems crucial that educators at all levels understand thoroughly the views held by the participants. Advocates of the whole language approach believe effective readers see meaning…

Recent research projects demonstrate that pictures in reading textbooks have a negative effect on the word-decoding ability of young readers. This particular study questioned whether the relative difficulty of the words being read determines the effect that pictures have on good, normal, and poor readers. After pretesting to determine reading…

Three experiments were conducted to investigate whether the results of previous research on rhymes detection were due to a rhyme production frequency bias (in favor of similar rhymes) in the materials used. The previous results had indicated that orthographically similar rhymes were detected more rapidly than dissimilar rhymes. In the three…

To ascertain what the most common or basic syllables were, 5,000 of the most frequent words (derived from the American Heritage List) were syllabicated graphemically. In the resulting computer assembled inventory, 3,402 separate or distinct syllables had frequencies of occurrence ranging from 1 to 230. Monosyllabic and two-syllable words each…

This paper describes a methodological approach to the reading processes, involving the use of measures of speed of response or reaction time (RT) obtained from subjects while performing reading related tasks. Following a review of the literature on measures of RT, two experiments currently being done at the University of Minnesota are described…

Previous research used a picture-word interference task to show that skilled and less skilled comprehenders in the third and fifth grades could retrieve the meaning of primer-level words equally well. With a similar task and comparable groups of children this study assessed the relationship between word difficulty and semantic access by using both…