Factor and cluster analysis of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities scores of 237 children (6 to 8 years old) with severe language handicaps showed a clear auditory-vocal and visual-motor factor. Ninety-seven percent of the Ss had the lowest scores on auditory association and grammatic closure subtests. (Author/CL)

Assesses effectiveness of a representational visual imagery training program on the reading and listening comprehension of a group of poor listening comprehenders (mean age: 7 years 8 months). Finds significant improvement on a curriculum-based test of listening comprehension, a standardised test of reading comprehension, and a measure of story…

Two studies compare phonology-based instructional strategies designed for improving spelling skills of elementary school children against instruction strategies that rely only on visual exposure of words. In both studies, posttests showed that children taught through psycholinguistic and phoneme awareness methods significantly outperformed the…

Investigates whether the prelexical phonological route develops prior to the visual route while learning to read Greek. Finds reading accuracy unaffected by the main psycholinguistic properties of words; chronological age did not influence long-term reading acquisition; and beginning readers used phonological information in reading but started to…

This study was divided into two parts: the primary purpose of the visual discrimination study was to examine the relationship between four rebus sizes and discriminability; and the primary purpose of the auditory visual association study was to examine the relationship between four sizes of rebus symbols and the ability to associate them with…

Incidental learning research with mentally retarded children has produced findings inconsistent with those reported for the intellectually normal population. This study was designed to further investigate the efficacy of incidental semantic classification instructions relative to taxonomic classification instructions or superficial color…

Kindergarten children were exposed to a behavior modification training activity involving perceptual scanning, which was designed to increase the field-independent mode of perception. The training was evaluated, based upon a group of 18 experimental subjects and a control group of 17 children. Subjects in the training group were individually…

Concludes that neither the focal attention nor contextual theory offers a powerful explanation for words learned through visual exposure. (FL)

Kindergarten students were taught words with or without pictures to test the focal attention hypothesis that pictures interfere with sight-word learning. In this study, pictures presented with words facilitated rather than hindered learning. (MKM)

The success of a reading laboratory using a learning modality approach was studied. The null hypothesis that there would be no significant difference among the levels of primary learning modality, sex, and race on the posttest of reading achievement for 31 second grade students, who read below grade level was tested at the 0.05 level after the…

Examined the relationship between phonological awareness and reading skills in eight-year olds from Britain, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Found that performance of Chinese children on phonological tests was not significantly related to their reading ability, in contrast to performance of English children, whose results continued to show a significant…

This research compared the effects of a televised presentation and a picture book on children's recall of specific verbal and visual content using 48 third-grade students in Florida as subjects. The children were first stratified by sex and then randomly assigned to view the same story in either a picture book with audiotape or a televised…

This study examined whether the sources of information children use to substantiate story-based inferences are influenced by the medium of delivery. The 48 third grade students who acted as subjects were stratified by sex and randomly assigned to one of two media conditions; i.e., each child was presented an African folktale either (1) as a…

In a study involving creative spelling, 300 kindergarten children and one first grader used computer programs to spell words in isolation and in stories they wrote. As the children made progress toward writing words in conventional spelling, they developed phonological spelling strategies similar to those that have previously been reported for…

A study was conducted to (1) examine children's visual and auditory attention to, and comprehension of, narrated and nonnarrated versions of two television programs, and (2) test a measure of auditory attention in relation to visual attention and to comprehension of information presented with or without narration. Subjects, 117 five- and…