Three passages that differed in accessibility but not linguistic difficulty were read by 52 11-year-old remedial readers, focusing on words read correctly. Readers were able to use linguistic cues to solve difficult words. Context dependency was affected both by decoding ability and text accessibility. (SK)

This article discusses ways of analyzing errors made in oral reading; interpreting mistakes in the correct way enables the teacher to understand why the reader is making them and to help overcome the reading difficulties they indicate. (JD)

A brief introduction to the field of psycholinguistics and its contributions to the development of a theoretical model of the reading process is presented. Selected elements of a psycholinguistic model of the reading process with a focus on the reader's use of linguistic cue systems are delineated. The concept of an efficient decoding strategy is…

A one year descriptive study investigated the strategies used by a group of competent beginning readers who were learning to read in a program in which text reading was the main instructional task. Subjects included 52 six-year-old children attending 20 randomly selected schools in Auckland, New Zealand. Strategy usage in oral reading was related…

To examine the effect on comprehension of mistakes made while reading, a three-experiment study was conducted. A secondary aim was to determine whether the unskilled reader would make hypotheses about what words in the text should be. In the first test, 80 nine-year-old students with average or above average reading abilities read narrative…

Discusses how language cues are used in the reading process, describes a means of evaluating a learner's effectiveness in processing these cues, and suggests ways to help foster more effective reading strategies. (Author/RK)

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between reading comprehension and the perception of syntactic and semantic errors by fourth graders. Forty-eight students were divided according to reading comprehension tests into high and low performance groups. Each student then read orally twelve sentences, of which four were normal…

Investigates the effect of reading ability on graphically and contextually constrained oral reading errors of fourth grade readers at differing degrees of reading difficulty. Indicates that, at both low and high levels of difficulty, better readers relied on contextual information and poor readers relied more on graphic cues. (MS)

This study investigated the success rate and the type of teachers' responses to miscues during a six-month tutoring program. Teachers gave prompts, or cues, to help each child recognize unknown words, concentrating on behaviors hypothesized to encourage pupil success and independence in decoding. Previous research had shown that inservice teachers…

It has been suggested that good readers make better use of semantic/syntactic information and use relatively less graphic information than do poor readers. To test these hypotheses, minor visual alterations were inserted in words in connected text. Fifteen good and 15 poor readers at the fourth-grade level read two of the altered Passages orally.…

This paper investigates the intentional creation of ambiguity by composers of cryptic crossword puzzles. Taking a research question of "what makes a cryptic clue more difficult to solve than a simple crossword clue," it compares a sample of cryptic and quick crosswords from "The Guardian" and attempts to isolate the linguistic…

The reading responses of 80 second grade students to words in context and words in isolation were analyzed. The children were tested individually with four oral reading selections (kindergarten through third grade levels), a set of comprehension questions, and a word list. The children recognized fewer words in isolation than in context. The…

In order to determine whether bilingual (Spanish/English) readers of English are less efficient in using language cues than are monolinguals (English), the Reading Miscue Inventory (RMI) was used to analyze the reading performances of 60 subjects--ten bilinguals and ten monolinguals each in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. Subjects read orally at…

Reviews research in which children's processing of individual words is examined in prose context. When taken together, the data suggest that the reader's dependence on contextual constraint for individual word identification decreases with age. (HOD)