An experiment examined orthographic facilitation of vocabulary learning, that is, whether showing students spellings of novel words during learning helps them remember the words when spellings are no longer present. The purpose was to determine whether having students decode the spellings of vocabulary words improves word learning over passive…

An experiment compared the impact of more and less semantically connected sentence contexts on vocabulary learning. Third graders (N = 40) were taught the definitions and meanings of six unfamiliar verbs: "anticipate," "attain," "devise," "restrain," "wield," and "persist." The verbs were…

An experiment examined whether metalinguistic awareness involving the detection of semantic ambiguity can be taught, and whether this instruction improves students' reading comprehension. Lower SES third graders from a variety of cultural backgrounds (M = 8 yr. 7 mo., N = 46) were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Those receiving…

Working from previous findings that learning of paired nouns improves when the nouns are joined by a verb rather than a preposition, and by a preposition rather than a conjunction, the present study investigates the factors influencing this form-class effect and offers an explanation in terms of transformational grammar. (Author/FWB)

Third- and sixth-grade readers were asked to label sets of pictures printed with distracting words (either nouns, adjectives, or functors) and nonsense syllables. (Author/JMB)

This study explored the viability of several theories in describing adjective memory. For the study, college students were told either to form images or to learn sentences. A noun-prompted sentence recall task exposed their memory for adjectives modifying either subject nouns. Results revealed that subject modifiers were better remembered than…

Research is reported which explores the viability of theories of sentence memory in describing adjective memory. (Author/RM)

To explore adjective language development and examine its relationship to seriation, several tasks were given to 40 children aged 4-8. Comprehension and production of adjective forms were measured--vocabulary, coordination, comparison. Ability to order objects by size was used to assess intuitive-level seriation. (CHK)

Results of a study in which first graders learned ten unfamiliar function words in two different formats indicated that sentence readers learned more about the syntactic and semantic identities of function words, whereas list readers remembered their orthographic identities better and could pronounce the words faster and more accurately in…

The three articles in this publication discuss the following topics: (1) a psycholinguistic perspective on beginning reading that focuses on the child's linguistic system, rather than on the information processing strategies he or she learns to use in reading, and identifies word recognition as the major hurdle faced by the beginner; (2) the issue…

Focusing on research about children's acquisition of reading and spelling skills, this paper discusses the larger picture of reading acquisition, issues addressed by research, and results of this research. The paper cites numerous studies on the subject, including studies on whether environmental print experiences enable young children to process…