A synthesis of the extant research on reading interventions for students with reading difficulties and disabilities in fourth and fifth grade (ages 9-11) is presented. Thirteen studies with treatment/comparison study designs and eleven single group or single subject studies were located and synthesized. Findings from the 24 studies revealed high…

Reports on a study that used oral reading analysis to examine the oral reading performance of two types of disabled readers in order to gain additional insights into the relationship between word recognition and comprehension. (HOD)

Good readers in grades 5 and 6 read material changed to include particular types of orthographic anomalies to determine if the perceptual unit in reading was the letter or some other unit larger than the letter. (HOD)

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…

Third- and fifth-graders, like adults, quickly named words preceded by either an incongruous or a normal incomplete sentence. Results (1) support the assumption that context effects on children's word recognition are caused by spreading-activation and expectancy-based-attentional processes operating simultaneously and (2) indicate that word…

Poor comprehenders from grades five and six were asked to read and rate the comprehensibility of three short passages. Passages with large numbers of modifying words were considered the least comprehensible. Support exists for the hypothesis that poor comprehenders process print in piecemeal fashion. (Author/JN)

Thus far the several different strategies that have been employed to investigate the size of the perceptual span during reading have not yet resolved the question of whether good readers have a larger span than poor readers. An investigation was designed to determine the region of text from which letter information is used during a fixation of the…

The purpose of this study was to determine if differences existed between second- and fifth-grade students' word recognition errors, and if differences existed between the word attack strategies utilized by them. Using the Informal Reading Inventory, a random sample of twenty-five second graders and twenty-five fifth graders was taken from three…

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between word recognition and comprehension achieved by second and fifth grade students when reading material at various levels of readability. A random sample of twenty-five second and twenty-five fifth graders, taken from three middle class schools, was administered a…

This study examined the nature of reading comprehension to determine if the process is best described as a unitary ability or in terms of multiple skills that can be identified and measured. Test items were constructed to measure each of the comprehension skills selected for investigation: (1) remembering word meanings, (2) inferring word meanings…

In this investigation of potential sources of individual differences in free-recall learning and retention by children, learning ability is defined in terms of performance on a free-recall test with the upper and lower thirds of the distribution typically being defined as fast and slow learners. Variables concerned with short-term memory,…

Investigates the theory that readers might mediate the recognition of an unfamiliar word by comparing and contrasting that word to known words by studying a population of fourth- and fifth-grade readers who could correctly pronounce common one- and two-syllabe words but not common polysyllabic words. (HOD)

The influence of word recognition and conceptual knowledge on readers' comprehension of narrative text has become a fundamental assumption associated with text processing in the primary grades. Features of conceptual knowledge such as prior knowledge, content knowledge, domain knowledge, and discourse knowledge are believed to be significant…

A study was undertaken to determine the relationship between word recognition and comprehension achieved by second and fifth grade students using reading material at various levels of readability. The testing instrument used was the Spache Diagnostic Reading Scale containing levels from primer through eighth grade. A pilot study provided a…

Word identification latencies and word prediction accuracy were compared for groups of skilled and less skilled fifth grade readers in three experiments. In each experiment, discourse context reduced identification latencies for less skilled as well as skilled readers. This was true both when context was heard and when it was read. The general…