Study of the relationship between family frequency, form frequency, and elementary school students' word knowledge indicated that family frequency tended to be a sizably better predictor of student word knowledge than was form frequency. (Author/CB)

The study involving 35 educable mentally retarded (EMR) children (8 to 11 years old) investigated the effects of manipulating the potency of contextual information in sentences and assessed the role which word frequency plays in eliciting responses. Results supported the facilitative effects of contextual information on word identification of EMR…

In three experiments on the effects of word imagery, length, and frequency on reading difficulty, high-frequency words were found to be easier to read for both good and poor readers. High-imagery words were easier to read for poor readers only. Word length had little effect on reading difficulty for either group. (Author/MV)

The study, involving 12 poor and 12 good fourth grade readers, tested the effects of context on the identification of high-frequency words. (BD)

Compared intellectually gifted children and controls on their ability to name and classify words and pictures of high or low frequency. High IQ children had shorter response latencies than other children and also showed no word frequency effects in the word naming tasks. (Author)

To determine if measures of the frequency of English root words can serve as reliable predictors of knowledge of those words, a 98-item multiple choice vocabulary test, in which all of the items were English root words, was administered to 46 third graders and 45 fourth graders. The percentage of correct responses for the words was correlated with…

Compilation of a list of the most common phrases used in reading was begun with the rationale that the quick recognition of phrases would facilitate reading comprehension. These first efforts showed that categorizing phrases by parts of speech did not provide acceptable levels of accuracy. The system that was effective, however, used a computer…

To discover the truth about the extent of children's reading vocabularies, a project was undertaken at the Falk Laboratory School, University of Pittsburgh, to determine how many words first, second, and third grade children could recognize in print. A team of graduate students tabulated the words appearing in commonly used basal materials and in…

The reaction times (RTs) of 48 elementary school students in two word identification tasks were recorded to gauge the effects of orthographic and phonic structures. The subjects, high ability and low ability students from grades four and five and from grades two and three, either matched a word to one of two pictures on display or decided if a…

A study was conducted into the operation of an interactive-compensatory model of reading. Specifically, it examined the development of context-free word recognition skills, their role in contextual reading, and the degree to which one word recognition skill might compensate another. Four word factors were examined: (1) orthographic redundancy (the…

A study investigated the concept of visual memory and its relationship to the spelling process by examining the attempts of a group of Australian elementary school children to spell a selection of words containing silent consonants. Subjects, 360 second, third, and fourth grade students divided into three spelling ability groups, were given 20…