Visual-verbal paired-associate learning (PAL) is thought to be related to reading acquisition and, more specifically, to word reading skills. To date, the uniqueness and strength of this relationship has remained unclear because most studies have been conducted in opaque orthographies such as English, and few studies have controlled for all of the…

Research Findings: This study investigated the bidirectional relations among paired associate learning (PAL), language-specific skills and Chinese word reading in kindergarten children from second year (K2) to third year (K3). We tested 204 children on four mapping conditions of PAL (i.e., visual-verbal, verbal-verbal, visual-visual, and…

Background: Research has shown that paired associate learning (PAL) plays an important role in children's word reading across different languages. However, little is known about the construct of PAL and its relationship with word reading in Chinese children. Methods: A total of 204 second-year kindergarten children from Mainland China were…

This study investigated the construct of paired associate learning (PAL) and its associations with Chinese word writing in kindergarten children. A total of 188 Chinese children (95 boys, mean age = 5.65 years; SD = 0.34) from [Xi'an], Mainland China in the third year of kindergarten participated in this study. Children were assessed on measures…

This study examines the concurrent relationships between phoneme awareness, visual-verbal paired-associate learning, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and reading skills in 7- to 11-year-old children. Path analyses showed that visual-verbal paired-associate learning and RAN, but not phoneme awareness, were unique predictors of word recognition,…

We examined the growth of spelling skills in a large sample of Norwegian children (N = 228) over the first 3 years in school. The roles of phoneme awareness, letter knowledge, rapid automatized naming (RAN), visual-verbal paired-associate learning, and verbal short-term memory as predictors of later spelling skills were examined. Phoneme awareness…

The authors present the results of a 2-year longitudinal study of 228 Norwegian children beginning some 12 months before formal reading instruction began. The relationships between a range of cognitive and linguistic skills (letter knowledge, phoneme manipulation, visual-verbal paired-associate learning, rapid automatized naming (RAN), short-term…

Examined relationship of phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory, and visual-verbal paired associate (PA) learning with word recognition and decoding skills in 6- to 11- year-olds. Findings suggest that PA learning and phonological awareness tasks tap two separate mechanisms involved in learning to read. (Author/KB)

Adults learned the meanings of rare words (e.g., gloaming) and then made meaning judgments on pairs of words. The 1st word was a trained rare word, an untrained rare word, or an untrained familiar word. Event-related potentials distinguished trained rare words from both untrained rare and familiar words, first at 140 ms and again at 400-600 ms…

Two experiments aimed at extending the principles of paired-associates learning transfer to the acquisition of reading skills are reported. Approximately 15 first graders were randomly assigned to each of the 10 treatment conditions. In the first experiment, four types of letter training were compared to two control conditions. The experimental…

Research supported by the Cooperative Research Program of the U.S. Office of Education, CRP-S-378.

One hundred six recent articles are abstracted that are relevant to research carried on in the Word Identification activity. The articles cover investigations on intersensory integration, response mediation, and facets of response learning. (Author)

This paper represents an attempt to study the graphemic-phonemic associations that are formed during the acquisition and subsequent retention of beginning reading responses and to evaluate the heuristic value of viewing the formation of these associations as a classical conditioning process. Two experiments--one on first graders and one on first…

The purpose of this study was to resolve the focal attention versus context controversy. Eighty first-grade and 84 second-grade children from a metropolitan school system served as subjects. Subjects in each grade were randomly assigned to each of four experimental conditions: picture-word, no picture-word, picture-sentence, and no…

The paper reports on an Australian study comparing two methods of teaching a word recognition reading task to eight mildly retarded adolescents. One method involved incidental learning, while the other involved a more structured paired-associate approach. It was found that all eight Ss learned a short list of tool names equally well under either…