Reviews three sorts of converging evidence regarding dyslexic children's phonological processing difficulties: data from studies of spoken language impairments in dyslexic readers, evidence from the analysis of dyslexic reading and spelling skills, and evidence of phonological deficits that vary in severity and extent across the life-span in…

The study involving 56 hearing and 24 deaf children (9-11 years old) sought evidence of language knowledge in deaf children extending beyond formal instruction, and consequently suggestive of a functional generative language system. (Author/SBH)

Previous research has demonstrated that readers utilize orthographic structure in their perceptual recognition of letter strings. Two experiments were conducted to assess whether this utilization varied with reading ability. Anagrams of words were made to create strings that orthogonally combined high and low single letter positional frequency and…

Reports on children's mastery of one type of sentence structure which is derivationally complex and which has been shown to be psychologically complex as well, given the criteria of both comprehension and acceptability to the native speaker. (HOD)

A developmental study investigated the pictorial and linguistic main idea identification skills of 104 students in second, fifth, and eighth grades. In the pictorial task, the subjects studied a complete picture story and ranked the effectiveness of four separate main idea alternatives at capturing the meaning of the story. Following the same…

Focusing on future directions for English and reading research, the papers presented in this book examine the complex interplay of skills, processes, and classroom conditions that influence the development of children's competence in reading, writing, and the language arts. The titles and authors of the essays are as follows: (1) "Reading and…

The production of non-narrative information (descriptive versus expository) across written and oral modes was examined for second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade Greek elementary school students. Written and oral protocols were taken from a total of 240 students at each of 3 grades and evaluated according to: (1) the size of the text produced, measured…

The comprehending score is a theoretically derived measure of language processing that identifies those miscues that indicate that the reader is making sense of the printed language he or she is attempting to read. A study was undertaken to explore the relationships between post oral reading cloze test scores and seven theoretically constructed…

Sensitivity to story information that conflicted with expectations was examined in kindergarten, second, fourth, and sixth grade children. The children either read or listened to stories about familiar events. One story was consistent with children's "scripts" for these events, while the other story contained script-inconsistent information. All…

Intended for elementary school teachers of reading and composition, this book assembles several articles on the reading/writing relationship that have appeared in 1982 and 1983 issues of the journal "Language Arts." The three sections of the book define the relationship between composing and comprehending, explore relevant research, and…

This article reports a study in which fourth graders were tested on their recall of stories they had read. Thrity-two children, divided into two groups of 16 by reading ability, each read two passages and were scored for recall. The passages read were either the original versions of two stories, semantic rewrites (in which anaphoric elements,…

Reports on a study of word recognition in second grade, fourth grade, sixth grade, and college students, which investigated characteristics of word processing (holistic versus component) at various stages of reading development. (AM)

Intended to bridge the gap between current research and theory about literacy learning and teaching and teacher knowledge of that theory and research, this book raises questions about what teachers should know about language, literacy, and learning to help children become confident, reflective, independent learners both in and out of school.…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 34 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) object conservation and receptive language in day care center infants; (2) the syntactic incorporation of linguistic units; (3) implicit theories of meaning in…

Parsing sentences into meaningful phrases and clauses is an essential step in language comprehension, and parsing difficulty is a common reading problem. Prosody (intonation, stress, and rhythm) provides information about phrase and clause boundaries in spoken language that is not available in written language. In an experiment to test whether…