Compares the effectiveness of word box instruction and word sort instruction on 42 first-grade children's phonemic awareness, word identification, and spelling performance. Finds significant differences favoring (1) word box instruction over traditional instruction on all measures except spelling; and (2) word sort instruction over traditional…

Investigates what skills are best able to account for orthographic analogy use during early reading and tests the finding that there is no independent association between reading ability and orthographic analogy use. Suggests that phonemic awareness and reading experience best account for analogy use, while orthographic analogy use contributes to…

This article describes a two-year study addressing the effectiveness of a highly structured, systematic tutoring intervention implemented by minimally trained college students with two cohorts of at-risk first-grade readers. Participants were 61 first-grade children in Cohort 1 and 76 first-grade children in Cohort 2. Tutors participated in three…

Contrastive feature hierarchies have been developed and used for some time in depicting typical phonological development and in guiding therapy decisions. Previous descriptions of feature use have been based on independent analyses and usually phonetic inventories. However, recent trends in phonology include a relational analysis of phonemic…

The purpose of this study was to examine the short-term effects of a music education intervention on the receptive language skills of students in an at-risk early childhood program. The target population was nine students ages 3, 4, and 5 in an at-risk, inclusive classroom in a Chicago public school. The problem of language delay is indicated in…

This executive summary describes results of the "Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report." The report presents preliminary findings from the Reading First Impact Study, a congressionally mandated evaluation of the federal government initiative to help all children read at or above grade level by the end of third grade. The No Child…

U.S. social programs, set up to address important problems, often fall short by funding specific models/strategies ("interventions") that are not effective. When evaluated in scientifically-rigorous studies, social interventions in K-12 education, job training, crime prevention, and other areas are frequently found ineffective or…

Purpose: This study addressed the effects of 3 different paradigms for scoring orthographic transcriptions of dysarthric speech on intelligibility scores. The study also examined whether there were differences in transcription accuracy among words from different linguistic classes. Method: Speech samples were collected from 12 speakers with…

This study provides detailed descriptions of the reading impairments in four 10-year-old Norwegian children with dyslexia. In all four cases reading comprehension was well in advance of the children's slow and inaccurate word-recognition skills. Phonological decoding (as assessed by pseudohomophone and nonword reading) appeared relatively…

Learners' consciousness of mismatch of the phonemic inventory of their mother tongue with the language being learned may prompt them to activate their conscious grammar knowledge to monitor their oral production. This happens only when they become conscious of the nature of the task in advance. Otherwise the mismatch is believed to challenge their…

This project was developed and implemented to increase the target students' phonemic awareness in order to be able to make sense of the alphabetic principle and become successful independent readers. The objectives for the project were for 8 of the 10 target students to score 80% on the posttests of rhyme detection, blending, and the Yopp-Singer…

Based on the unsubstantiated conclusion of many Hualapai analysts that the glottal stop is one of the phonemes of the language, this paper argues that the glottal stop is for the most part predictable. Data are presented to show the instability as well as the predictability of the glottal stop, and rules are presented, based on the Sound Pattern…

Patterns which partly resemble the proposed "fronting,""voicing," and "stopping" tendencies exist to a statistically significant degree in David Olmsted's large sample of child speech. Instead of the "voicing" pattern that has been suggested, however, voiced stops seem to be favored word-initially, but voiced fricatives are favored word-finally.…

Speech discrimination by 12 children aged about 1 1/2 to 3 1/2 years was tested, using the discrimination learning procedure of Shvachkin's 1948 Russian study. Recent work on the acquisition of syntax and semantics shows an ordered acquisition for linguistic items; this pilot study was to test whether the ability to discriminate between consonants…

This program, included in "Effective Reading Programs...," is designed to minimize initial difficulties in learning to read, to control early reading and word attack habits, and to meet a wide range of individual differences. Begun in 1966, the program serves an unselected cross-section of children in 110 kindergarten through third-grade…