Explores children's ability to segment utterances into syllables and phonemes, and their skills in the recall of sentences of low and high complexity. (HOD)

Twenty-four normal, misarticulation-free second-grade children participated in tasks designed to test their ability to perceive misarticulations in contextual speech. Results indicate that children are able to successfully identify sentences in which misarticulated words occur in addition to specific misarticulated words within sentences. (SW)

Discusses the hazards that the English language contains for children learning to read, reports the Bullock Report's recommendation to judge I.T.A. on its merits, and describes research findings suggesting that the probability of reading failure is considerably greater when T.O. is used than when I.T.A. is used. (GT)

A project of computer research on the interconversion of Spanish texts between orthographematic and orthophonematic versions was carried out at Columbia University. That project is described here. (Author/CFM)

Presents examples of the social causation of reading handicaps from a cross-cultural study of 14 countries called the Comparative Reading project. The study compared ways children were taught to read. (BF/JH)

A study examined the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability in 29 elementary children enrolled in a residential school for students with deafness. Reading ability was significantly correlated to language ability, but not to phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness did not contribute to any variance in reading ability. (Contains…

Six kindergartners with or at risk for emotional disturbance and reading deficits received a supplementary reading intervention over seven months. After instruction, participants outperformed six control at-risk and six norm-referencing students without disabilities on curriculum-based measures assessing early phonemic awareness and basic reading…

The intervention described in this article focuses on providing extra spelling instruction to young children who experience difficulty with literacy learning. The CASL Spelling Program is designed to teach children basic sound/letter combinations, spelling patterns involving long and short vowels, and common spelling words that fit these patterns.…

A study investigated the role of speed of processing, rapid naming, and phonological awareness in reading achievement of 279 third-graders. Poor readers were proportionally slower than good readers across response time measures and on the rapid object-naming task. Processing speed, IQ, and phonological awareness explained variance in reading…

A twin study involving 808 children with reading disability (RD) and 455 children with phonological disorder (PD) found each were heritable on their own. Further, even when correcting for RD, the two disorders were found to be co-heritable, indicating co-familiarity is at least partially driven by genetic influences. (Contains references.)…

Examined whether letter names, which bridge the gap between oral and written language among English speaking children, have a similar function in Hebrew. In findings from studies of Israeli kindergartners and first graders, children were found to rely on letter names in performing a number of letter saying, spelling, and word recognition tasks.…

Compared the vowel responses of severely disabled readers with those of normal control children in reading orthographically regular nonwords. Vowel responses were compared on both age and reading level groups, and the vowel responses of two out of three reading disabled groups paralleled those of their reading level peers. (Author/DJD)

Describes several studies examining how children become skilled at processing graphic cues. Reports that prereaders do not acquire graphic skills by learning to read signs and labels in their environment. Concludes that mastery of letters is required for processing graphic cues. (MM)

Using poor and normal readers, three studies evaluated semantic coding and phonological coding deficits as explanations for reading disability. It was concluded that semantic coding deficits are unlikely causes of difficulties in poor readers in early stages but accrue with prolonged reading difficulties in older readers. Phonological coding…

Examined the relationship between phonological awareness and reading skills in eight-year olds from Britain, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Found that performance of Chinese children on phonological tests was not significantly related to their reading ability, in contrast to performance of English children, whose results continued to show a significant…