Describes two experiments which investigated the importance of immediate memory in explaining the defects of children with specific learning disabilities. A group of such children and group of normal children were compared with respect to their performance on an immediate memory task involving the recognition of letter trigrams. (Author/CS)

The studies reported here examined the role of orthographic regularity and summed positional frequency in the perception of letter strings. College sophomores and sixth graders were asked to indicate whether or not a target letter was present in a six-letter string. Orthographic regularity and summed positional frequency were found to have no…

The development of rapid word processing skills was investigated using a visual search task. Visual displays of varying orthographic structure (words, pseudowords, nonwords) were presented to college students and to kindergarten, second-grade, and fourth-grade children. Response latencies were measured as subjects indicated whether a previously…

A study was conducted to determine the feasibility of developing an automatic Chinese/Japanese input device for a machine translation complex. A specific scanning technique to digitize Chinese/Japanese ideographs is recommended as a result of the study. Results of the study include specification of the resolution necessary to successfully digitize…

Identifies basic tasks in Chinese writing reform. These include simplification of characters, spreading the use of the standard vernacular, and spreading the use of phonetic spelling. (Author/DB)

Two general topics are discussed: (1) The sequence of events that transpire in one second of reading, to suggest the nature of the processes that link them; and (2) the relation of this description to the acquisition of reading. Contains a list of 71 references. (RB)

"32 English readers and 32 Hebrew readers were shown stimuli with directional characteristics (English and Hebrew letters) and stimuli with no directional characteristics (arrays of different circles, bars, colors, and geometric figures) for scanning. The results showed that, while directional stimulus characteristics affected the direction…

Describes new information processing developments and end-user products from 18 companies. Applications include optical storage and imaging devices, document management software, and automated business and data processing systems. Developments include flat-screen images, affordable image item processing, digital writing technology, and a federal…

Describes a project at Carnegie Mellon University libraries to convert the congressional papers of the late Senator John Heinz to digital format and to create an online system to search and retrieve these papers. Highlights include scanning, optical character recognition, and a search engine utilizing natural language processing. (Author/LRW)

The study investigated the compensatory effectiveness of the Quicktionary Reading Pen II (the Reading Pen), a portable device with miniaturized optical character recognition and speech synthesis capabilities. Thirty participants with reading disabilities aged 10-18 were trained on the operation of the technology and given two weeks to practice…

Twenty college students, naive to Blissymbols, were asked to "guess" the meaning of 64 Blissymbols presented without their word gloss. The influence of symbol representativeness and the concreteness of associated word labels on the symbols'"guessability" was analyzed. The guessability of a symbol's gloss was significantly…

Describes a breakthrough in omni-font optical character recognition (OCR) that will permit economical automation of library catalogs and other library processes within the next few years. (RAA)

Outlines a course in artificial intelligence for liberal arts students that has no programing prerequisites. Topics and projects included in the course are described, including problem solving; natural language; expert systems; image understanding, or character recognition; and robotic systems. (28 references) (Author/LRW)

Reviews present and possible future developments in the techniques of electronic document management, the major ones being text retrieval and scanning and OCR (optical character recognition). Also addresses document acquisition, indexing and thesauri, publishing and dissemination standards, impact of the Internet, and the document management…