This experiment investigated whether individual differences in written language proficiency among university students predict the early stages of lexical retrieval tapped by the masked form priming lexical decision task. To separate the contributions of sublexical facilitation and lexical competition to masked form priming, the effects of prime…

Concludes that as little phonics instruction as is necessary should be presented to help the learner achieve increasing independence in the various coding tasks. (RB)

Presents a word identification exercise that can be used with students who have no prior knowledge about the teaching of reading. (FL)

Uses a novel word-reading efficiency measure to determine if articulations or processing times associated with reading the word "aye" were enhanced through the phonological or orthographic qualities contained in the preceding word. Documents the importance of separating phonological and orthographic information in English homophones. (SG)

A series of 6 experiments involving 210 subjects from a college subject pool examined orthographic priming effects between briefly presented pairs of letter strings. A theory of othographic priming is presented, and the implications of the findings for understanding word recognition and reading are discussed. (SLD)

Examines three experiments about how readers combine immediate sentence context with information presented earlier in a paragraph in processing words in text. Finds that discourse information operates interactively with local context to affect readers' expectations for and processing of upcoming words. (MG)

Five experiments were conducted on the ways that college students processed ambiguous words in sentences. Two classes of ambiguous words (noun-noun and noun-verb) and two types of context (priming and nonpriming) were investigated using a variable stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) priming paradigm. Noun-noun ambiguities consisted of two semantically…

The hypothesis that attentional demands of word recognition covary with other measures of reading efficiency was tested with 27 undergraduates performing naming and probe-detection tasks singly and in combination. Findings support the assumption that attentional demands of basic reading are a source of differences in reading skill. (SLD)

Compares explanations of letter-detection errors in the word "the" based on the unitization hypothesis (errors occur because the word is processed as a whole unit, and lower order processes are not completed) to the structural model of reading (errors occur because the syntactic function of the word pulls attention away from this word).…

According to Gough and Tunmer (1986), in a "Simple View of Reading" (SVR), Reading comprehension (RC) = Decoding (D) x Linguistic Comprehension (C). To further evaluate this model, this paper describes an exploratory study of the performance of 60 university students, the majority of whom received academic accommodations at university to…

The development of rapid word processing skills was investigated using a visual search task. Visual displays of varying orthographic structure (words, pseudowords, nonwords) were presented to college students and to kindergarten, second-grade, and fourth-grade children. Response latencies were measured as subjects indicated whether a previously…

Studies the effects of sentence contexts on word-nonword decision latencies among deaf and hearing college students. (HOD)

A visual search task was used to investigate the development of word processing skills used in reading meaningful text, and to evaluate the relative difficulty of employing different types of units. Subjects were 20 second graders, 19 fourth graders, and 20 college students. (MP)

Measures of working memory capacity and measures of word knowledge were used as predictors of three measures of reading skills in 95 undergraduates. Vocabulary size and speed of accessing it were independent of word knowledge. Reading comprehension, reading speed, and text inferencing ability were independent measures of reading skill. (SLD)