This twin study examined the relative contributions of genes and environment on 2nd language reading acquisition of Chinese-speaking children learning English. We examined whether specific skills-visual word recognition, receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness, phonological memory, and speech discrimination-in the 1st and 2nd languages have…

Eleven four-year-old children were tested for discrimination of the following word pairs: rope/robe, seat/seed, pick/pig, ice/eyes, and mouse/mouth. All word pairs were found to be discriminable, but performance on seat/seed and mouse/mouth was inferior to that of the other word pairs. (Author)

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which a preassessment of motor development and perceptual skills predicts achievement in word recognition for kindergarten children. The instruments used for evaluation were the Lincoln-Oseretsky Motor Development Scale, Thurstone's Identical Forms Test, Wepman Auditory Discrimination Test,…

The purpose of this experiment was to present redundant auditory information along with written displays to see if first graders would be aided in discrimination between legal and illegal nonwords. Seventy-two middle-class first and second graders of both sexes were given one of three treatments to study the effect of redundant auditory…

THE ABILITY OF SECOND GRADERS TO PRODUCE TACHISTOSCOPICALLY PRESENTED LETTER SEQUENCES AND DISCRIMINATE AND VOCALLY REPRODUCE AUDITORILY PRESENTED WORDS WAS STUDIED IN THREE EXPERIMENTS. THE READING DISABILITY GROUP WAS FOUND TO BE SIGNIFICANTLY AND CONSISTENTLY INFERIOR TO THE CONTROL GROUP IN REPRODUCING THE VISUALLY PRESENTED LETTER SEQUENCES…

Strategies children use when they recognize words were explored. To measure the effectiveness of two different methods of training children to attend to the critical features of letters, 40 first-grade urban children were presented two pairs of letters (similar and dissimilar) simultaneously or successively. Unexpectedly, it was found that with…

A study was conducted to investigate a series of hypothesized cues used in recognizing aural stimuli (Nonsense syllable trigrams) by adapting to the oral mode an experimental technique used successfully in visual word recognition studies. Three classes of cues were studied: (1) a cue for position, (2) a cur for the of cues were studied: (1) a cue…

The purposes of this study were to assess the effect of phoneme-grapheme consistency (PGC) and cue emphasis (CE) on the development of decoding skills in first graders and to determine the relationship of consistency of original lists to the recognition of new words. Subjects were 162 first graders, mean age 6.11 years and scoring above 30 on the…

This study investigated alternate methods of letter discrimination pretraining and word recognition training in young children. Seventy kindergarten children were trained to recognize eight printed words in a vocabulary list by a mixed-list paired-associate method. Four of the stimulus words had visual response choices (pictures) and four had…

A DIAGNOSTIC KIT DESIGNED TO HELP CLASSROOM TEACHERS DIAGNOSE READING DIFFICULTIES MORE ADEQUATELY AND MOTIVATE PUPILS MORE EFFECTIVELY IS PRESENTED. SUGGESTIONS ARE APPLICABLE TO LOWER PRIMARY CHILDREN. DIAGNOSTIC TECHNIQUES ARE OUTLINED FOR SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE OBSERVATION OF LANGUAGE ABILITY, VISUAL PERCEPTION SKILLS, AUDITORY…

The assumption that the learning of letter names in their proper sequence is a prerequisite for literacy can be questioned. There is disagreement over the value of early letter-name training. It is variously said to aid in letter or word discrimination, to aid in attaching sounds to letters, and to interfere with both of these tasks. An analysis…

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…

THE HYPOTHESIS THAT CHILDREN WHO ARE TAUGHT TO HEAR AND DESIGNATE SEPARATE SOUNDS IN SPOKEN WORDS WILL ACHIEVE GREATER SUCCESS IN LEARNING TO ANALYZE PRINTED WORDS WAS TESTED. THE SUBJECTS WERE 90 KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN, PREDOMINATELY MEXICAN-AMERICANS AND NEGROES. CHILDREN WERE RANDOMLY ASSIGNED TO ONE OF THREE TREATMENTS, EACH OF 3-WEEKS DURATION…

Four possible alternative approaches for developing word recognition skills (including sample lesson plans for both primary and intermediate grades) were presented. The first emphasized the importance of the relative order of difficulty of word analysis skills involving phonic abilities and auditory and visual discrimination in both primary and…

In an attempt to describe the place of phonics in a word-attack program, five areas of word attack are discussed: sight recognition, the use of context clues, morphology (structural analysis), phonics, and dictionary use. Facility in the use of all of these, singly and in combination, is stated as being necessary for a person to be an independent…