A study of the constraints on word recognition errors (miscues) readers make when reading a passage printed conventionally and one printed in a regularized orthography such as the initial teaching alphabet (i.t.a.) was undertaken with 50 second-grade students divided equally between children taught according to the orthographies being studied. The…

The Initial Teaching Alphabet (i.t.a.), devised by Sir James Pitman as a simplified alphabet for beginning readers, consists of 44 characters plus a set of rules for standard spellings of English words using these characters. The characters and rules are designed to ensure easy transition from i.t.a. to traditional orthography (T.O.). In September…

Data from four of the Cooperative First Grade Studies (1964-1965) were reanalyzed for four first grade projects, (Fry, Hayes, Mazurkiewicz, and Tanyzer). These projects were selected because they compared the Initial Teaching Alphabet approach with traditional orthography-basal reader approaches. The focal point of this reanalysis was to study the…

Three main issues relating to the question of silent speech in reading are considered: (1) How do Chinese speakers process Chinese ideographs in short-term memory? (2) How is Chinese students' learning of written English affected by the transition to an alphabetic language? (3) Are the strategies for encoding written words in short-term memory…