The relationship between partial word knowledge and instruction was investigated for 132 college students. When correct usage could be chosen on the basis of general semantic constraints, subjects did well and instruction had no effect. However, studying dictionary definitions did increase the amount of specific information available in memory.…

Ways are discussed in which foreign words are stored in learners' mental lexicons. Then several activities and exercises, which aim at improving learners' receptive and productive vocabulary skills, are presented. (42 references) (LB)

Describes the Dunn and Dunn Learning Styles Model, along with selected instructional strategies for teaching word recognition to students who cannot master vocabulary and selected language arts skills through conventional methods. Notes that research has revealed the impact of teaching such students through their learning style…

Comparison of the individual reading strategies of 26 severely impaired developmental dyslexics and 26 nonhandicapped readers found a distribution of skills and strategies over a continuum in both groups. Dyslexic students were specifically impaired in phonological processing, and half of them employed more whole-word oriented strategies than the…

Five first grade language-impaired children were trained on the phonological and perceptual components of the retrieval process, segmenting words, manipulating word segments, and forming visual and auditory images. The children improved in naming untrained pictures, but five children whose training focused on semantic associations and organization…

Investigates and compares the real-time language-processing abilities of language-impaired and normal children using a work recognition reaction time paradigm. Results showed that the language-impaired children used linguistic context to facilitate work recognition but were slower to do so than their normally developing peers. (38 references) (GLR)

Concludes children benefit from teacher training in integrating environmental print into the curriculum; logos selected for classroom use should come from children's immediate environment; instruction should include experiences with manuscript forms of the logos; and children who are encouraged to bring to class examples of environmental print…

Investigates genetic influences on reading in a sample of 285, 13-year-old twins. Finds the heritability of disability for reading recognition to be nonsignificant but that spelling had a substantial genetic contribution to all levels of disability. Suggests two possible independent aspects of phonological ability, each influenced by genetic…

This study considered data from two longitudinal studies of students which included 154 students of varied reading abilities and 64 poor readers who had been evaluated from third through eighth grades. Single-word reading was strongly predicted from third-grade rapid naming only with poor readers, even when other relevant factors were controlled.…

The definition of "orthographic neighbors" in word recognition research was analyzed in two experiments using a variety of the three-field technique. Only orthographically related pairs differing from the prime by the third or fourth letter showed inhibitory relatedness effects compared with unrelated word condition. Results suggest…

Twenty-three children (ages 10 to 12) with language impairment and 46 typically achieving adults participated in two auditory lexical-decision tasks evaluating effects of phonological opacity on word recognition. Findings indicated that the language-impaired children were less able than controls to identify phonologically opaque…

This study compared the lexical mapping (acoustic-phonetic analysis) stage of auditory word recognition in 21 children (mean age 8 years 9 months) with specific language impairments (SLI) with children matched for either chronological age or vocabulary. The SLI children performed comparably to control groups on all dependent measures related to…

Examines the relationship of second-language-learning patterns and experience to the acquisition of automatized processing skills in the morphological domain. Finds that Russian-speaking undergraduate students were significantly less accurate and slower than the English-speaking students at a naming task, and less impaired by experimental…

Two studies examined whether 1-year olds' name learning during joint attention was guided by expectation that names will be in the form of spoken words. Results showed that 13-month olds, but not 20-month olds, learned a new sound/object correspondence, as evidenced by their choosing targets reliably in responses to hearing the word or sound on…

This study examined effects of intrasyllabic units on lexical decision performance in 15 normal reading (NR) children and 15 children with reading disabilities (RD) in a transparent orthography (Spanish). Findings suggest that Spanish children with RD do not use correspondences based on higher level units (onsets and rimes) in visual word…