Attempted to determine whether children from grades two and six generate inferences while they read or only later in response to tasks which require inferences. (Author/DB)

In the author's experience, a significant source of reading difficulty for many beginning and struggling readers are misconceptions about print concepts so basic teachers assume their students are aware of them. Many children fail to grasp implicit principles of print such as the following: the reader cannot make up the words, the order of letters…

Investigates differences among children in relative reliance on spelling-sound rules v word-specific associations in reading words. The tendency to rely on rules is correlated with ability to read regular words. Findings indicate that analogies and smaller-unit rules are used in the reading tasks. (JMB)

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)

This experiment attempted to discover under what circumstances, if any, children use whole words, syllables, letter clusters, or letters as units during reading. The results indicated that syllables and letter clusters are probably not processed as units for any type of word, but there was slight evidence that letters may function as units,…

Good and poor readers in grades 3-5 read stories 4 times in succession, crossing out misspelled words as they read (the misspellings changed each time). Reading times for good, and especially poor, readers decreased across repeated readings, and spelling errors were detected better on later readings by both groups, suggesting that the print was…

Investigated second- through sixth-grade children's word-reading skills by testing their processing of nonword primes. Determined that good readers showed more orthographic priming than poor readers at more times, and more pseudo-homophone priming at short durations. Determined that the quick, automatic and general activation of this priming…

Concludes that the ability to detect small differences in pairs of pictures, letters, or words does not change beyond grade 3, but the ability to recognize sound-alike words improves through the grades. (RB)

Response latencies were obtained in word matching and sentence completion tasks from disabled readers, age-matched normal readers, and reading-level matched normal readers. Results indicated that perceptual and semantic processing are interconnected and improvements in the speed and accuracy of one facilitates improvements in the other. (HOD)

Outlines three constructs of text difficulty: text-based (objective), performance-based (behavioral), and a combination of the two (subjective). (HOD)

A study of 2 groups of children (mean ages 7.47 and 9.04 years and reading ages of 7.27 and 9.48 years) showed a word type effect attributable to the more skilled readers. Regular-consistent words were read more accurately than regular-inconsistent and exception words; the latter two did not differ. Familiar words are appended. (Contains 57…

The concepts of reading held by students in grades one through eight are reported on in this paper. Over 1600 children were individually interviewed to obtain answers to the following three questions: What is reading? What do you do when you read? And What would you tell someone reading is if that person were just beginning? The findings reveal…

An examination was made of factors affecting reading performance of upper elementary students. Factors included effects of questions placed at various positions in the text, role of factual and inferential questions used as adjunct aids, and differences in processing strategies used by the readers in probed recall tasks. (Author/HOD)

A sample of 80 first- and second-grade children selected to represent four levels of reading competence were tested in their recognition of semantic, syntactic, and lexical change in sentences previously decoded during prose reading. (JMB)

Examined three factors that influence rereading transfer in children: story relatedness, reading ability, text difficulty. In four experiments, elementary school students read pairs of texts related by word overlap, content overlap, both kinds of overlap, or no overlap at all. Extent to which children benefited from word or content overlap…