The goal of this longitudinal study was to examine which skills in early literacy determine the development of word recognition, reading comprehension, and spelling in the 2nd grade of the elementary school. A cohort of pupils was followed and tested during the 2nd year of kindergarten and the beginning of the 1st and 2nd grade. It appeared that…

This study provides detailed descriptions of the reading impairments in four 10-year-old Norwegian children with dyslexia. In all four cases reading comprehension was well in advance of the children's slow and inaccurate word-recognition skills. Phonological decoding (as assessed by pseudohomophone and nonword reading) appeared relatively…

This study deals with the ability of the beginning reader to recognize the relationships between isolated letter sounds and the same sounds embedded in a word context. The subjects were 64 prekindergarten children attending six private preschools in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The subjects were all Caucasian and spoke a standard English…

Investigated the processes that 158 children in grades 3 through 6 used for spelling. Children had the most difficulty with spellings based on morphological information and the least with those based on invariant sound-spelling relationships. (SKC)

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…

Notes that the primary use of sequence monitoring has been to determine which linguistic units are involved in word recognition and how these units might differ across languages. The task involves presenting subjects with targets either congruent or incongruent with a linguistic unit in the target-bearing item. The article focuses on the…

Two experiments investigated naming performance for items with and without digraphs. Both experiments compared performance for Regular Consistent, Regular Inconsistent and Exception words. Experiment 1 also compared nonwords with Non-Existent Bodies to those with existing Consistent and Inconsistent Bodies. Naming was slower for nonwords…

The process of naming an exception word prime (e.g., PINT) delays subsequent naming of a nonrhyming regular-inconsistent word body neighbor target (e.g., TINT). Both an activation account (Taraban & McClelland, 1987) and a learning account (Burt & Humphreys, 1993) have been offered to explain this interference effect. We investigated how long…

This article takes up the proposal, originally postulated by George Miller in the US (Miller, 1969) and later taken up by Harry Kay in the UK (Kay, 1972), that psychologists should work through non-psychologists to help alleviate social problems. Specifically it evaluates a reading intervention programme devised by educational psychologists and…

Evidence supports the hypothesis that visual word recognition may involve recoding into phonemic form. Less pronounceable nonsense words are recognized as nonsense faster than those more pronounceable. Differences in pronounceability may produce their effects during sequencing of neural instructions of each phoneme. (CHK)

Presents tables of initial and final letter clusters for use in psychological experiments as well as in the teaching of reading. (HOD)

Research studies how visual information and redundancy contribute to letter and word identification. (Authors)

Shows two major handicaps in the anti-phonics movement which suggest that the future of the movement is doubtful: (1) the demonstrable weakness in both the theory and method of anti-phonics; (2) the increasing confidence that publishes and editors of widely used basal readers are placing in phonics. (BF/JH)