In this investigation, the differences in psycholinguistic processing of written and spoken language and the psycholinguistic deficiencies of poor readers were studied by giving meaningful, anomalous, and random word strings to 18 good readers and 18 poor readers who were reading at the fourth grade level. It was found that in both spoken and…

Stella Center's belief in the basic importance of grammatical structure as a factor in reading comprehension substantiated the author's theory that the ability to comprehend syntactic structure is positively correlated with the ability to comprehend meaning. Original instruments devised to test this hypothesis included a test which utilized…

A new kind of reading-language processing system, which has been in use at the Patterson Road School (Orcutt, California) since December 1972, is described in this document. The program consists of two ungraded reading chains of twelve groups each (determined by reading comprehension) which meet for 45 minutes daily, read material above the…

Paired-associate (PA) learning of children was investigated as a function of age, stimulus-type, and mode of elaboration. Sixty nursery school children (average age 53 months) and 60 first graders (average age 84 months) were selected as subjects. Each child studied nine pairs of objects, photographs, or drawings for two trials of PA learning by…

It has been suggested that good readers make better use of semantic/syntactic information and use relatively less graphic information than do poor readers. To test these hypotheses, minor visual alterations were inserted in words in connected text. Fifteen good and 15 poor readers at the fourth-grade level read two of the altered Passages orally.…

Two studies involving 215 subjects tested the hypothesis that orthographic coding bypasses phonological coding after the early stages of reading or spelling. It was found that nondyslexics continue to develop phonological coding skill until adulthood and rely on it for reading and spelling to a significantly greater extent than do dyslexics.…

Reviewed theoretical and empirical work in phonological recoding, concluding that phonological representation is used to aid comprehension and suggesting that decoding graphemic information into a phonological form is important for early readers. Asserts that future research should examine differences in the use of visual versus phonological…

Presents a stage-structure analysis of reading applicable to any method of reading a teacher might choose to use. (Author/MP)

Examines whether the comprehension of English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students who were trained to summarize improved more than that of students who responded to short-answer questions. Finds that since the reading comprehension of all classes improved significantly, the study could not prove that either approach was the major cause of this…

This study of 281 individuals (ages 6 to adult) with reading difficulties who received 80 hours of intensive instruction in the Auditory Discrimination in Depth Program found that subjects exhibited significant gains on measures of phonological awareness, sound/symbol connections, word identification, spelling, and decoding in context. (Author/JDD)

This review focuses on areas of converging evidence concerning the importance of phonological awareness and the corresponding curricular and instructional implications for diverse learners. Five areas of converging evidence are identified: (1) phonological processing ability explains significant differences between good and poor readers; (2)…

Investigating the selective attention strategy, a study examined the type of attention allocated to important information by good and poor readers. Also tested was the methodological validity of using a conceptual (word recognition) perceptual (tachistoscopic word flash) task as a means of investigating the types of information processing that may…

Within the framework of a general model of communication, a model of language communication has been developed and applied to the perception of cohesion. To measure students' perception of textual cohesion, a pilot study in the United Kingdom built "noise" into texts by deleting parts of each texts. Subjects, 59 nonremedial students whose first…

A model for the measurement of reading skills was used as the basis for the development of the Decoding Skills Test. The model emphasizes that decoding skills are based on one of two processes: word recognition through phonic/linguistic decoding or through basal word recognition. Word lists appropriate for the elementary grades were used to…

Describes a study indicating that the ability to use context deliberately to facilitate word recognition reaches maximum for average readers by grade six and does not appear to show further improvements at higher reading skill levels. Discusses possible reasons for the discrepancies between this and other studies that use incomplete contexts. (HTH)