The hypothesis that word context reduces visual rather than acoustic confusion between possible targets was tested in a series of experiments. All involved tachistoscopic presentation of letter strings followed by a pattern mask. Data from eight college students showed that target letters that are confusable only visually and acoustically…

The extent to which individual differences in pictograph recall performance are related to reading readiness and other aspects of language and cognitive development is examined in this paper. In each of three studies kindergarten children were taught names and toy enactions for approximately 30 pictographs. The kindergarteners were then…

A study evaluated the effects that a modified neurological impress method (a process whereby a student and a teacher read simultaneously) had on developing a student's decoding skills. Forty-two students in grades one through eight were randomly assigned to one of four groups: (1) a control group; (2) a group in which students read simultaneously…

This paper reviews recent research to determine why children encounter problems understanding what they read. Four points are discussed as especially relevant to children's problems in reading comprehension: (1) reading differs from early language experiences, and an analysis of these differences can indicate likely sources of reading difficulty;…

Research by developmental psychologists has investigated metaphor comprehension without its surrounding context. This research has the positive feature of being unidirectional, all indicating that the older the child, the greater the possibility that metaphor will be understood. The disadvantages of the studies for educators include the fact that…

The existence of a transfer effect between single-word decoding skill and contextual literal and inferential comprehension performance was investigated using sixth grade students classified as poor and very poor readers. Two training groups and a control group, each composed of 15 poor and 15 very poor readers, were used in the study. One group…

A probe recall short-term retention task was used to test the applicability of the "phonological recoding" (Conrad, 1972) and "flexible decoding" (Smith, 1972) models to processing tactics used by readers of Chinese. Subjects were 45 adult speakers of Cantonese. Stimuli were lists of Chinese characters which varied in terms of phonological and…

Thirty-two students from each of grades three and four were administered the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests, two word lists, and a number of tests selected from the Wisconsin Design for Reading Skill Development. Individual Performance Profiles were used to determine which Design tests to administer, the number of attempts required to attain skill…

The Perceptual Conditioning for Decoding Program, funded under a special grant from the New York State Legislature, was designed for the teaching of decoding as the first phase in learning to read to 1900 kindergarten through third grade students in eleven schools in Queens County, New York. For those target students not knowing the alphabet, a…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between reading comprehension and the perception of syntactic and semantic errors by fourth graders. Forty-eight students were divided according to reading comprehension tests into high and low performance groups. Each student then read orally twelve sentences, of which four were normal…

This study was concerned with the development of a program for teaching high speed word recognition through training in more sophisticated decoding strategies. The method reported focused on training the student to use minimal visual information while making maximum use of contextual cues in word recognition. The emphasis was on directing…

The primary goal of the conference panel on modeling the reading process was to prepare a programatically related set of suggestions which could lead to a clearer account of reading and to an ability to pose successively better research questions. This panel report contains sections on the development of a model for word recognition during…

The building of a repertoire of written words recognized on sight is an important prerequisite for complex reading skills. Coordination of certain sense modalities, when present in the learning of a new written word, increases the probability that this word will be retained over a period of time. This coordination involves specific intersensory…

This paper reviews some recent research on the component skills necessary to learn to read by phonic techniques. The review is divided into four sections, each relating research on one of the skills necessary for novel word decoding. The four skill areas are: (1) learning invariant grapheme-phoneme correspondences; (2) relating the isolated letter…

Selected by the International Reading Association's Committee on Psycholinguistics and Reading, the papers in this volume were first presented at the 1968 IRA Preconvention Institute: (1) "Reading Is Only Incidentally Visual" (Kolers) suggests that the teaching of reading should move away from the purely visual; (2) "Some Thoughts on Spelling"…