Concludes that when children learned confusable words, their subsequent learning of words was at a faster rate than those children who learned nonconfusable words first, and that high imagery words were learned more quickly than low imagery ones. (FL)

Notes that teaching techniques used to "build" vocabulary are not based on the ways most people acquire vocabulary. Discusses the problems and possibilities of expanding students' language usage. (RL)

Examines some problems and techniques for teaching prefixes and suffixes at the middle elementary level. States that fewer affixes should be taught, while emphasizing the application of affix knowledge to unfamiliar words. Lists the most common prefixes and suffixes in printed school English for grades three to nine. (MM)

The purpose of this study was to investigate verbal working memory processing both before and after providing semantically elaborated training sentences designed to enhance memory for symbol-word (visual-verbal) pairs. Abilities of 20 children diagnosed with Reading Disorder (RD) and 20 age-matched peers who were normally achieving in reading (NA)…

This study extends the findings of Gaustad, Kelly, Payne, and Lylak (2002), which showed that deaf college students and hearing middle school students appeared to have approximately the same morphological knowledge and word segmentation skills. Because the average grade level reading abilities for the two groups of students were also similar,…

In order to better understand the neuropsychological underpinnings of the relative strength in word identification in individuals with Down syndrome, the performance of children and adolescents with Down syndrome (N=29) was compared to the performance of a nonverbal-IQ matched group of children and adolescents with developmental disabilities of…

A task required subjects to make a word-nonword decision to visually presented items--words with a high or low number of meanings or lawful nonwords. Words with several meanings produced shorter decision times, indicating that words with multiple meanings have multiple memory entries. (CHK)

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…

The use of context clues is basic to the reading act. This paper emphasizes the importance of teaching students to recognize context clues and outlines reasons for teachers' frequent failure to do so. It then suggests ways of helping students become aware of ways context clues can be of value to them as readers and of teaching them to identify…

Vocabulary knowledge provides a source of prior knowledge and word meaning that can be used to enhance reading comprehension. It is important that teachers be aware and knowledgeable of the many strategies available to enhance vocabulary growth, and also how to teach these strategies to students. These strategies can range from the use of context…

Discusses exercises in foreign language teaching in which the learner can, from experience in his own language, conjecture the meaning of foreign words from the context. Shows, with examples, how such exercises can be created using nonsense words. (IFS/WGA)

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)

The Woodcock Reading Mastery Test-Revised (WRMT-R) is advertised as usable with English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students (with provisions to ensure students' understanding of instructions). This articles describes new features of the WRMT-R and examines criticisms of it since its debut in 1973. (SM)

A study examined the nature and extent of the instruction, application, and practice in deriving word meanings from context in a variety of basal reading series. Seven major basal reading series at the fourth-grade level (published between 1986 and 1989 and readily available) were analyzed. Results indicated that: (1) the series differed…