Discusses language comprehension and describes a technology for computer-aided text analysis called READWARE and software from the READWARE family called the Research Assistant that measures the relatedness of words or phrases by examining their letters. The theory of Letter Semantics is explained, and paradigms for text processing in information…

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…

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…

A previous study by Gibson et al. (1972) that investigated the effect of orthographic structure on letter search was replicated and extended in order to identify factors that might explain the apparent discrepancy between their results and those of comparable studies. Experiment one tested whether the discrepancy might be explained by difference…

The reversal errors in the printing of 51 first grade students were examined. These children were asked to print a series of reversible target figures (letters and numbers, such as 2-s, p-q, p-9, and b-d) that were presented alone and with their mirror-image counterparts. To control for the possibility that the mere presence of another figure…

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…