First grade students (n=221) were tested on measures of verbal fluency, visual attention, phonological awareness, orthographic recognition, rapid automated naming (RAN) of letters and objects, and reading. Findings indicated that word reading was directly and significantly predicted by RAN letter naming and general RAN cognitive processing time of…

Designed to assess the cognitive requirement expected or implied in beginning reading materials and in their instructional suggestions and to determine whether these materials are appropriate to the cognitive development of the children who will use them, this instrument is for use by evaluators with the first reader in a basal series. It directs…

A longitudinal (from kindergarten through grade 2) study with 244 children evaluated 3 hypotheses regarding the causal relationship between phonological processing abilities and reading acquisition. The study found a bidirectional relationship between phonological processing skills and reading skills and stability in individual phonological…

Designed to measure children's abilities to synthesize concepts from several sources, this measure is based on the assumptions that children move from the concrete to the abstract, from specific to generic, and that the ability to synthesize and form new concepts is an important prerequisite to reading comprehension. Each form of the test is…

Following instruction using a stimulus equivalence procedure to teach matching of dictated picture names with printed words, two preschool children were also able to match pictures with printed words, match printed words with pictures, or match printed words with oral names. Results have implications for teaching early reading skills. (Author/DB)

Four computer-animated tasks were created to analyze the underlying structure of emerging phonological awareness at 3.5 years of age and to explore factors that influence children's (n=91) performance. The children were able to master tasks demanding identification, blending, and continuation of phonological units. Analysis supported two major…

Reports results of four experiments testing whether syllable structure affects children's performance in phonemic analysis tasks and in other reading related tasks. The experiments were motivated by theories that syllables consist of an onset (initial consonant or consonant cluster) and a rime (vowel and any following consonants). (AS/Author)

This study compared the phonological awareness ability of 11 children (ages 6-8) with persistent phonological impairment to that of 11 phonologically normal children. Phonologically normal children scored higher on three of the four phonological awareness measures, with no differences on word recognition. Speech intelligibility was a significant…

The readings in this collection were prepared to accompany a report of a series of experiments conducted to determine what information readers, both skilled adults and children beginning to read, use when they read to understand a story. Titles of the readings are are (1) "Oral Reading: Does It Reflect Decoding or Comprehension?" (2)…

A series of experiments were conducted to determine what information readers use when they read to understand a story. The experiments examined both skilled adult readers and children beginning to read. Oral reading was used both because elementary school teachers frequently ask children to read aloud and because oral reading provides an…

Studies the development of word-retrieval speed and its relationship to reading in 72 average and 11 severely impaired readers in kindergarten through the second grade. (HOD)

Three students (ages 17, 19, and 21) with moderate disabilities were taught to read and match-to-sample sight words comprising 4 4-member stimulus sets. Student performance indicated that symmetric relations emerged before one-node transitive relations and that one-node transitive relations emerged before two-node transitive relations. Results…

Standardized sensory, perceptual, linguistic, intellectual, and cognitive tests were administered to 470 entering first graders. Factor analysis found four factors, which were reading related skills, visual cognition, verbal cognition, and speech processing. Cluster analysis identified nine profiles. The strongest predictors of later reading and…

Prepared by members of the Institute for Research on Teaching and the Center for the Study of Reading, the papers in this collection examine reading comprehension as an interactive process and explore how comprehension instruction occurs in the complex workplace of the classroom. Specific topics discussed in 20 papers include the following: (1)…

Since an author does not provide all critical information, a text is never fully explicit; it demands that the reader/listener supply missing elements in order to form a coherent and logical whole. A study was conducted to explore both the types of responses urban first grade students made when asked to predict a narrative ending and differences…