Describes a project that developed a list of the most frequently used words in television captions in order to assist teachers in building on the word recognition strength and reading skills of students with deafness. The list contains 250 words and is included. (CR)

Explains repeated readings and the procedures involved. Looks at the reading miscues of a seven-year-old child over successive readings of a text to learn what miscue analysis reveals about repeated readings, fluency, and the word recognition view of reading. (SR)

Two studies examined whether the unusual accessibility of phonological information from written Korean affected the word recognition processes of second, third, and sixth graders. Semantic priming was found for sixth but not second graders, the opposite of the pattern seen in children reading English, whereas younger children tended to show…

Explains distributional regularity (DR), an intuition that sound sequences occurring frequently and in multiple contexts are candidates for the lexicon. Describes study that proposed hypotheses about children's segmenting sounds using DR functions, exploiting phonotactic constraints on pronunciation, and learning word-boundary clusters. Details…

Describes a new paradigm that may be appropriate for uncovering speech perceptual codes. Illusory words are detected by blending two dichotic stimuli. The paradigm's design allows for comparison of different speech units by the manipulation of the distribution of information between two inputs. (23 references) (Author/CK)

Reports on a study testing the validity of the Names Test, an individually administered phonics assessment. Provides support for the Names Test's validity by showing it to be significantly correlated with established tests of word recognition and decoding ability. (SR)

Examines longitudinal prediction of English and Spanish reading skills in a sample of 249 Spanish-speaking English-language learners at 3 time points in kindergarten through Grade 1. Phonological awareness transferred from Spanish to English and was predictive of word-identification skills. Other variables showing cross-linguistic transfer were…

Two studies compared the effectiveness of two procedures (multiple examples across trials and within trials) in teaching 10 students (ages 10-20) with moderate disabilities functional word discriminations. The first procedure was superior in acquisition; the latter procedure, however, was better under generalization for most participants.…

Proposes and illustrates a method of identifying key words in text, and leads from this proposal to the notion of key key words (words that are key in many texts). Notes that a key key word has associates: words that are key in the same texts as a given key key word. Notes that these associates can be grouped together in clumps. (18 references)…

Reports an experiment contrasting word-onset gating with results when words were gated from their word endings. The study demonstrated a significant recognition advantage for words gated from their onsets. The overall results support the position that the perceptual advantage of word-initial information can be understood within a general…

A study of 129 older adults (ages 55-84) with sensorineural hearing loss examined the effects of age, gender, and auditory thresholds on several measures of speech recognition. Results found significant declines with age for males in maximum word recognition, maximum synthetic sentence identification, and keyword recognition in high-context…

Forty-two below-average readers (ages 7 to 10 years) were given single-word training, phrase training, or no training. Trained children in either condition learned to decode target words quickly and accurately using flashcards, and had better comprehension than untrained children. (SLD)

A step-by-step plan is presented for teaching a mnemonic strategy that students with and without learning disabilities can use to improve word recognition skills. The SCUBA-D strategy involves (1) Sounding it out, (2) Checking sentence clues; (3) Using main idea and picture clues, (4) Breaking words into parts, (5) Asking for help, and (6) Diving…

Notes that to work at the cutting edge of children's reading development, primary-grade teachers need to consider some important questions about materials and curriculum. Discusses why word-recognition prompts are important, describes research on word-recognition prompts, and discusses teachers' materials and word-recognition prompts. Considers…

Explores how the native speakers of English and nonnative speakers of English in adult basic education classes present different reading behaviors. Suggests that adult basic education teachers should not only be aware of how much decoding students know but also to what extent they actually use that knowledge when reading. (SG)