Age-related deficits may exist in episodic memory (knowledge of the context in which an item appeared previously) and semantic memory (knowledge of an item's meaning independent of the context). In order to examine adult age differences in semantic priming effects and subsequent episodic retention for visually presented words, 24 young (18-22…

Two word/nonword decision experiments were carried out to investigate differences in reading between congenitally blind children reading Braille and sighted children dealing with print. Three aspects of single-word recognition were studied: semantic processing, word frequency effects, and phonological recoding. (Author/RH)

First grade students (n=221) were tested on measures of verbal fluency, visual attention, phonological awareness, orthographic recognition, rapid automated naming (RAN) of letters and objects, and reading. Findings indicated that word reading was directly and significantly predicted by RAN letter naming and general RAN cognitive processing time of…

Naming speed skills of 45 dyslexic children (mean ages=8, 13, and 17) and slow learning children (mean age=10) were compared with those of normally achieving children. Results indicated that children with dyslexia and slow learners have persistent and severe problems in naming speed for all stimuli, regardless of whether the stimulus requires…

Twenty-three children (ages 10 to 12) with language impairment and 46 typically achieving adults participated in two auditory lexical-decision tasks evaluating effects of phonological opacity on word recognition. Findings indicated that the language-impaired children were less able than controls to identify phonologically opaque…

A sample of 133 Spanish children (ages 8 to 13) was classified by IQ and reading level and given a lexical processing task. The study found that IQ did not explain differences between learning-disabled (LD) or nondisabled (NLD) children in lexical processing. Lexical and sublexical parameters had a greater influence on LD students than NLD…

Ten children (ages 7-10) with visuoperceptual problems were compared to sighted children on lexical decision tasks with words, nonwords, and format distorted items. The partially sighted children relied on phonological mediation as well as the "visual" route in word recognition. Regularity effects, as well as effects of intact and disrupted…

The aptitude treatment interaction hypothesis of Kaufman and Kaufman was investigated by examining the effects of matching teaching strategies with cognitive processing strength to increase disabled readers' (N=57) word recognition skills. Although results indicated a pattern supporting the predicted aptitude-treatment interaction, differences…

This study compared the phonological awareness ability of 11 children (ages 6-8) with persistent phonological impairment to that of 11 phonologically normal children. Phonologically normal children scored higher on three of the four phonological awareness measures, with no differences on word recognition. Speech intelligibility was a significant…

Describes two experiments that examined word recognition processes of second, fourth, and sixth graders. Shows that older children use meaning frequency to narrow the amount of information kept active following word recognition. (HOD)

An earlier study showed that responses are remembered better when subjects produce them from cues, than when subjects read cue-response pairs. The decided memory advantage for generated targets relative to read ones is known as the generation effect. The present research is designed to study the generation effect for cues, following a…

Two experiments investigated the effects of preceding sentence context on the naming times of sentence completion words in third-grade children and college students. In the first study subjects were shown incomplete sentences with four types of target words: best completions; semantically and syntactically appropriate, but less likely completions;…

Five experiments examined the developmental relation between attention to target and context information and target memory among second and fifth graders and college adults. Results show that when the context is meaningfully related to target information, adults are less selective than children and are more likely to attend to context information.…

A study was conducted to provide a replication of the gaze duration algorithm proposed by M. A. Just and P. A. Carpenter using a different kind of passage, to compare the three gaze duration algorithms that have been proposed by other researchers, and to measure processing time in reading. Fifty-one college students read a passage while their eye…

Four experiments examined the spelling capability of students in grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, and college. Results suggested that reading unit size increases with age and reading ability. Younger children, like adults, unitize common words, and unitization of less common words increases as word configurations become more familiar. (RWB)