Teaching students the most frequent sounds of the alphabet letters is the first crucial step in good phonics instruction. But beginning letter and sound lessons, especially if poorly taught or too rapidly paced, can be overwhelming and confusing for some young children and struggling readers. How can we simplify the cognitive task for such…

A study of the constraints on word recognition errors (miscues) readers make when reading a passage printed conventionally and one printed in a regularized orthography such as the initial teaching alphabet (i.t.a.) was undertaken with 50 second-grade students divided equally between children taught according to the orthographies being studied. The…

Three main issues relating to the question of silent speech in reading are considered: (1) How do Chinese speakers process Chinese ideographs in short-term memory? (2) How is Chinese students' learning of written English affected by the transition to an alphabetic language? (3) Are the strategies for encoding written words in short-term memory…

G. Wolford's perturbation model of letter identification is designed to account for identification errors of briefly presented characters. Its chief assumptions are that features are extracted in parallel, that some of these features become perturbed or mislocalized, and that mislocalizations are more likely to occur in the direction of the fovea…

Research suggests that when subjects are given a rule as to how to translate auditory or verbal information into images, the images have many common characteristics with cognitive representations derived from visual perceptions. This experiment examined the process of cognitive integration and the similarities and differences between how imagined…

A teacher educator describes his teaching experience in China and his finding that the Western behaviorist, alphabetic, linear mode of thinking has been widely adopted in education in that traditionally ideographic culture. The contrasting relationships of language, thought and behavior in the American and Chinese cultures is examined, and it is…

The hypothesis that word context reduces visual rather than acoustic confusion between possible targets was tested in a series of experiments. All involved tachistoscopic presentation of letter strings followed by a pattern mask. Data from eight college students showed that target letters that are confusable only visually and acoustically…

Two criteria for the automatic encoding of learning, instructional manipulation, and stimulus characteristics were studied in subjects who judged the frequency of occurrence of words, letters, and nonwords. In Experiment 1, six word lists were constructed with varying frequency of alphabet letters. A variety of instructions were presented (whether…