Noting that the 1974 revision and standardization of the Burt Word Reading Test resulted in a reordering of some of the words in accordance with current levels of difficulty, this manual includes directions for administering and scoring the new test form, provides age and class norms, and offers advice on the use and interpretation of the scores.…

BUILDING EFFECTIVE COMPREHENSION SKILLS IS DISCUSSED. FACTORS RELATED TO COMPREHENSION ARE PHYSICAL HEALTH, MENTAL DEVELOPMENT, EXPERIMENTIAL BACKGROUND, WORD RECOGNITION, AND THE PURPOSES OF THE READER. COMPREHENSION SKILLS CAN BE GROUPED INTO THESE AREAS -- READING FOR DETAILS, READING FOR MAIN IDEAS, READING TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN FACT AND…

A study was conducted to examine the effects of word familiarity on auditory discrimination and the interactions of the familiarity variable with age. Thirty-seven word pairs equated in sound and length and 37 nonsense word pairs similarly equated were selected according to the maturational level at which children learn different sounds. The…

The effects of the Edison Responsive Environment, a computerized typewriter on the development of primary reading skills are discussed. Subjects were 27 3- and 4-year-old children from lower and middle socioeconomic classes. A three-phase program taught these children to relate the names of letters to their upper- and lowercase graphic symbols, to…

The theoretical orientation based on perceptual development, proposed by Piaget in 1961, is the starting point of this investigation. According to Piaget, the perception of the young child is "centered" on dominant aspects of the field. With maturity, perception becomes "decentered" and progressively freed from the field. The…

Forty third-graders and an equal number of sixth-graders listened to a list of words and for each word had to indicate, by saying "old" or "new," whether it had appeared before on the list or not. The subjects gave more erroneous "old" responses to words which were semantically or phonetically related to previously heard words than to control…

This annotated bibliography on visual perception and its relation to reading is composed of 55 citations ranging in date from 1952 to 1965. Its divisions include Perception of Shape by Young Children, Perception of Words by Children, Perception in Backward Readers, and Perception of Shapes, Letters, and Words by Adults. Listings which include…

This study was designed to explore relationships between type and token frequencies and contextual position effects; specifically, the major question was whether or not vowel cluster pronunciation preferences of adult readers were more affected by frequency of occurrence than by graphemic environment. Two opposing hypotheses were tested regarding…

A corollary of the principle that reading comprehension depends on language comprehension is that word skill plus language comprehension skill produces reading comprehension skill. This corollary points to word decoding as being the major source of differences in skilled reading. Various data supporting this claim have been collected from…

The purpose of this research was to explore the level of perceptual processing being used by normal and educable mentally retarded beginning readers. The investigation tested the hypothesis that beginning readers show a positive relationship between word length and word recognition latency, implying serial processing. Data on accuracy and latency…

The purposes of this study were to determine the effect of word length on the learning difficulty of words found in reading materials for early primary level children, to determine learning difficulty indices of a set of fifty words, to compare the effectiveness of three methods of vocabulary instruction, and to replicate treatments for thirteen…

This document contains 21 reading activities for students in kindergarten through grade six. A description and procedure are given for each activity, including a list of materials needed. The activities include a variety of word games, multimedia approaches, and creative writing exercises. (LL)

There are basically two different models for the word recognition process. One model postulates that a reader primarily uses sound/symbol cues to recognize a word; a second model states that a reader focuses mainly on whole-word characteristics. To determine which model best fits beginning and adult readers, a multiple regression analysis was…

For this study of children's selection of key words, children in the first, third, sixth, ninth and twelfth grades were asked to identify which words, in their judgment, were key words in written materials. Relationship of these choices to skilled readers, to words derived from passage analysis, and to random selections of hypothetical subjects…

Existing mathematical models of word recognition are reviewed and a new theory is proposed in this research. The new theory integrates earlier proposals within a single framework, sacrificing none of the predictive power of the earlier proposals, but offering a gain in theoretical economy. The theory holds that word recognition is accomplished by…