Describes the steps in the natural process through which children use their syntactic, semantic, and phonological systems in learning to read. (DD)

Reviews recent psycholinguistic research to make a case for the importance of continual development of the semantic component of reading throughout the total reading process. (DD)

To study the notion of stage processing independence in reading, measures of the decoding process and semantic processing were obtained on a sample of elementary pupils. Performance on these measures was related to lexical accessibility, letter properties and the familiarity of the words used in the measures. (Author/JKS)

Reports on a psycholinguistic investigation of a 10-year-old, nonautistic hyperlexic on tasks of written and auditory presentations of single words, sentences, and text. Finds good development of both phonological and lexical reading mechanisms. Finds a significant dissociation between reading accuracy and reading comprehension and also between…

Recent studies have offered support for a constructive view of sentence memory in children, based on their preference in recognition errors for true inferences, which can be drawn from input sentences, over false inferences. However, with the materials used in these studies, this preference may reflect responding either on the basis of semantic or…

Eighty-four elementary school children participated in a two-part experiment replicating an earlier experiment that tested the hypothesis that children would offer semantic explanations for words presented orally more frequently than for words presented in written form. This experiment used subjects from a population different in socioeconomic…

The effect on comprehension of words containing more than one meaning was studied. In experiment one, subjects in grades four, five, and six were assessed on their ability to recall polysemous words and identify their meanings after having read them in sentence contexts. When words were assigned their primary sense in the sentences, subjects…

Investigated within-sentence contextual constraints in a sentence-completion task completed by 408 students from grade 6. (AA)

Suggests that integrating story maps into a reading lesson helps readers attend to details as well as to relationships between story elements before, during, and after reading. Reports findings of a study to support this belief. (FL)

Current views both of reading and of understanding spoken language conceptualize the process of deriving meaning as similar to hypothesis testing. The listener or reader is seen as selecting whatever information is required to confirm the hypothesized meaning. In the present study, 60 children (12 each in grades four through eight) reworded…

A study was conducted to examine the data collected by previous researchers on the degree of helpfulness of natural contexts. In this study two schemes of context cue types were compared on the basis of their contribution to word meaning acquisition, and their relationship to other text and word properties was explored. Subjects were 352 children…

The oral reading miscues of 18 proficient readers, six each from grades 2, 4, and 6, were divided into those which did not change syntactic structure (nontransformation miscues) and those which did (retransformation miscues) and were analyzed through the use of the Goodman Taxonomy of Reading Miscues. The two groups of miscues were compared with…

In this study 60 first and fourth graders selected pictures that best represented the meanings of sentences read to them. Results indicated that children were instantiating the target words with specific concepts rather than bringing to mind abstract, undifferentiated meanings. (HOD)

The psycholinguistic method of teaching reading stresses the use of the child's oral language ability and syntactic and semantic information. (JH)

Contrasts two theories about the use of semantic context information and reports data that support the theory that readers can use certain semantic strategies in dealing with context. (AEA)