To test the effects of selective attention on decoding skills, 23 children (grades 2 through 6) with learning disabilities were studied. Results showed that treatment directly improved the ability of the experimental groups to transfer spelling patterns learned in isolation to unknown words containing those patterns and improved the ability of Ss…

Examines evidence supporting the view that speech recoding is necessary prior to lexical access, explores an alternative view (that speech recoding occurs in working memory), describes an experiment suggesting that meaning analyses during reading can occur without speech recoding in working memory, and discusses models of reading. (GT)

Twenty-six expert adult readers, 13 of whom were blind, were compared for how they perceived and retrieved written information. The study found that braille readers were not limited to the isolated identification of individual braille characters as previously thought, but could integrate greater quantities of written information. Implications for…

The writing-reading process is a total interacting system comprising four subsystems: the writer, the text, the reader, and the context. A model of the complex interactions among these four subsystems is useful to the extent that it provides a framework for established facts, and in so far as it explains phenomena and suggests hypotheses. While…

In this study, a subset of the adult functional reading items from the National Reading Survey was administered to a group of approximately 80 adults, together with a set of materials designed to assess decoding skills. The purpose of the study was to determine whether or not the inability to answer the adult reading tasks correctly is…

A brief introduction to the field of psycholinguistics and its contributions to the development of a theoretical model of the reading process is presented. Selected elements of a psycholinguistic model of the reading process with a focus on the reader's use of linguistic cue systems are delineated. The concept of an efficient decoding strategy is…

Traditionally, reading disabled children have been characterized as suffering a performance or process deficit that prevents them from acquiring the knowledge and skills underlying proficient reading and comprehension. Such explanations raise some logical problems. Process oriented theories do not adequately explain the specificity nor address the…

Two sources of information are involved in reading; the visual information picked up by the eyes from the printed page and the nonvisual information, or prior knowledge, that the reader possesses. An overreliance on visual information leads to an overloading of the cognitive process involved in reading and loss in comprehension. Overreliance on…

Three experiments examined the relationship between reading skill and decoding. Children decoded and matched words and pseudowords of different syllable lengths presented in both aural and printed form. Prior verbal experience was manipulated. Decoding differences were not wholly attributable to prior experience with word units, as processes…

Vocalization latencies of young readers were a function of set size, number of syllables, and stimulus material. Differences between skilled and less skilled readers were absent for naming colors, digits, and pictures, but present for words; differences increased with number of syllables (and letters). Reading skill and decoding are discussed.…

Recommendations of an official report have generated a new consciousness in British schools of the importance of language in education. (Author/DS)

Experiments with 81 college students and 48 fifth graders investigated the role of one form of intra-word orthographic redundancy--the characteristic asymmetric spatial distributions of letters of the alphabet across serial positions within words. Adults were sensitive to letter positional distributions, as were fifth graders who were good…

Argues that reading, like speaking and writing, is an active language process in which readers display their sophistication as functional psychlinguists. While it is difficult to understand these active, underlying processes, authors advocate the use of oral reading as a data base. Presents a typology of miscues and demonstrates how they provide…

Reexamines two current, popularly held views about reading: the relative importance of word perception versus the reader's attention to the larger syntactic and semantic redundancies of the text. Some recent findings suggest the seriousness of the difficulty for those who cannot read high-frequency simple words. (Author/DB)

Assessed the degree of orthographic learning in homophonic choice, spelling, and target naming tasks with second graders. Found that processing of target homophones was superior to that of their homophonic controls and found a substantial correlation between orthographic learning and number of target homophones correctly decoded during story…