Investigates three important issues in kanji learning strategies; namely, strategy use, effectiveness of strategy and orthographic background. A questionnaire on kanji learning strategy use and perceived effectiveness was administered to beginner level, undergraduate students of Japanese from alphabetic and character backgrounds in Australia.…

Discusses the "Russian Dynamic Hand," a working prototype for introducing the Russian writing and sound system that has been available to students at Louisiana State University since September 1988. The project's evolution is discussed from an initial graphics-centered IBM prototype to a Macintosh version enhanced by an audio component.…

Three studies examined preschoolers' and kindergartners' learning of correspondences between phonemes and graphemes. Findings suggest that children use their knowledge of letter names and their phonological segmentation skills rather than memorizing these links in a rote, paired-associate manner. (Contains 26 references.) (Author/LB)

Study examined whether phonemic sensitivity is limited to alphabetically literate individuals. Children not exposed to reading instruction were given pairs of phonological sensitivity tasks. Novice readers scored higher in phonological sensitivity than nonreaders of equivalent letter knowledge, when controlled for verbal ability; among nonreaders,…

Presents a descriptive bibliography of children's alphabet books under the categories of: Animals and Nature, Cultures and Holidays, and Notable Graphics. Suggests activities for primary and intermediate grades which use these materials. (AEF)

This study investigated the development of alphabet knowledge among 91 nonreading children followed from the beginning of kindergarten through the middle of first grade. Findings suggested that alphabet knowledge consists of both letter-name and letter-sound knowledge, which have different developmental patterns and which have unique importance…

Until American Calvinist missionaries created a Hawaiian alphabet and writing system after their arrival to the Hawaiian islands in 1819, all Kanaka Maoli literature was oral. By inventing a Hawaiian alphabet, the missionaries were able to teach Kanaka Maoli reading and writing; by the early 1830s the first missionary-controlled printing press was…

Developmental changes in children's verbal fluency were explored in this study. One hundred and forty children aged from 7 to 16 completed four verbal fluency tasks, each with a different the production criterion (letter, sound, semantic, and free). The age differences were analyzed both in terms of number of words produced, and clustering,…

Two experiments tested the common assumption that knowing the letter names helps children learn basic letter-sound (grapheme-phoneme) relation because most names contain the relevant sounds. In Experiment 1 (n=45), children in an experimental group learned English letter names for letter-like symbols. Some of these names contained the…

Nonwords created by transposing two "adjacent" letters (i.e., transposed-letter (TL) nonwords like "jugde") are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words. This fact poses problems for most computational models of word recognition (e.g., the interactive-activation model and its extensions), which assume that exact…

Alphabetic orthographies vary in the (in)consistency of the relations between spelling and sound patterns. In transparent orthographies, like Italian, the pronunciation can be predicted from the spelling, in contrast to opaque orthographies such as English, where spelling-sound correspondences are often inconsistent. The pronunciation of English…

In 3 experiments the role of mediators in task switching with transparent and nontransparent cues was examined. Subjects switched between magnitude (greater or less than 5) and parity (odd or even) judgments of single digits. A cue-target congruency effect indicated mediator use: subjects responded faster to congruent cue-target combinations…

In this paper we describe an interactive activity that illustrates simple linear regression. Students collect data and analyze it using simple linear regression techniques taught in an introductory applied statistics course. The activity is extended to illustrate checks for regression assumptions and regression diagnostics taught in an…

Aim: The study compared the pattern of deficits, intelligence and neuropsychological functioning in subcategories of learning disorders. Methods: Forty-six children (16 with reading disorders, 11 with writing disorders and 19 with both reading and writing disorders--mixed group) in the age range of 7-14 years were assessed using the NIMHANS Index…

This study investigated the effects of using Romanized spellings on beginner-level Japanese vocabulary learning. Sixty-one first-semester students at two universities in Arizona were both taught and tested on 40 Japanese content words in a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) program. The primary goal of the study was to examine whether the…