The research reported here was designed to examine a number of factors that findings from verbal learning studies indicate should affect the recall and transfer of word identification materials. Sight word and phonics-based or rule-based learning were investigated in 112 kindergarteners who were identified as nonreaders. Groups were trained on…

Reviews the literature and describes some of the confusion where reading levels overlap in informal reading inventories. (RB)

Describes a study in which one of three neutral contexts inhibited word recognition, indicating that interpretation of context effects depends largely on the kind of neutral context employed. (HTH)

Confirms previous findings that the word recognition criterion for instructional reading level should be set at about 95 percent for students reading at grade levels one through six. (FL)

Describes four experiments of conditions under which irregular spelling or pronunciation influence two reading tasks--naming and lexical decision. Concludes that such irregularities only influence the reading of lower frequency words and that recognition of a large class of higher frequency words is insensitive to irregularities of spelling or…

Addresses the question of the relative contributions of surface word forms and root morphemes in word representation and recognition. (FL)

Describes a study that analyzed 273 responses to test words in context to determine which word identification strategies were being used by students who made gains in remedial reading classes. (FL)

The transfer phenomena observed in adults do not universally generalize to the pre-reader and training in phonic blending is necessary in order for phonic-letter training to yield positive transfer to a word-reading task. (RB)

Indicates that within the limits imposed by a one-to-one setting, children taught words by either of two segmented methods performed better in initial learning and transfer than did those children who were given only practice in reading unsegmented words. (FL)

Examines the strong vs the weak relationships between word recognition in isolation and in context hypotheses. (HOD)

Evaluates empirically a skill-oriented approach to teaching word attack such as that prescribed by the Wisconsin Design for Reading Skill Development with the desired outcome of functional reading ability. (HOD)