US government mandates to implement intensive phonics instruction in elementary classrooms invoke an alleged scientific superiority of this approach over more meaning-centered models. But curiously absent from this scientific enterprise is a study of the phonics system itself. Advocates of intensive phonics have not demonstrated that the commonly…

Investigates whether children who speak Kannada (a Dravidian language from South India) show the same pattern of specific dyslexia as children who speak European languages. Finds evidence of a consistent pattern in specific dyslexia which did not depend on any one writing system or geographical location. (RS)

Concludes that fourth-grade children were able to apply more phonics terms than they could define and that high ability readers could define more terms than could low level readers. (FL)

Examines the development of grapheme-phoneme conversion ability in normal and reading-age matched dyslexic readers. Thirty-six normal readers (mean age 9.5 years) and 18 children diagnosed dyslexic (mean age 12.1 years) served as subjects. (MP)

A study conducted with 20 good and 20 poor first-grade readers suggested that the ability to induce grapheme-phoneme relationships was much more strongly related to reading ability than was receptive vocabulary. Good readers appeared to apply a principled solution to a word-learning task, while poor readers used an associative solution. (Author/GT)

Although spelling instruction has traditionally treated almost every spelling word as requiring a separate learning act, recent research indicates that over 90% of American-English orthography actually is determined by a set of rules for unit phoneme-grapheme relationships, based with decreasing productivity upon three levels of…

Compares the different criteria used to identify poor spellers and readers from good spellers and readers. Findings reveal that visual memory of orthographic sequences may help to differentiate between poor and good spellers. (CB)

To determine whether disabled readers can benefit from letter-sound instruction if attention to individual regular words is increased, 38 male and 16 female disabled readers aged 7 to 13 years participated in whole word, letter-sound, or control training programs. Implications of improvement by both experimental groups are discussed. (SLD)

Second grade good readers (N=46) and fourth grade good and poor readers (N=46; N=48) were subjects in a study that examined linguistic cue usage by good and poor readers in a Southern metropolitan area. A secondary purpose was to compare the standard and phoneme cloze procedures with oral miscue analysis. The subjects were identified as good or…