Visual-verbal-paired associate learning (PAL) is strongly related to reading acquisition, possibly indexing a distinct cross-modal mechanism for learning letter-sound associations. We measured linguistic abilities (nonword repetition, vocabulary size) longitudinally at 3.5 and 4.0 years, and visual-verbal PAL and letter knowledge at 4.0 and…

The present experiments examined perceptual specificity effects using a rereading paradigm. Eye movements were monitored while participants read the same target word twice, in two different low-constraint sentence frames. The congruency of perceptual processing was manipulated by either presenting the target word in the same distortion typography…

A large-scale randomised-controlled trial of reading tutoring in 80 schools in Scotland used the Paired Reading (PR) technique. On long-term evaluation, cross-age PR was significantly better than regular teaching, but same-age was not. On short-term evaluation, PR pupils did significantly better than control pupils in both years, and cross-age and…

People with phonologic alexia often have difficulty reading functors and verbs, in addition to pseudowords. Friedman et al. [Friedman, R. B., Sample, D. M, & Lott, S. N. (2002). The role of level of representation in the use of paired associate learning for rehabilitation of alexia. "Neuropsychologia, 40", 223-234] reported a successful treatment…

This paper addresses several inconsistencies in the phonological deficit theory of dyslexia in relation to children with language impairments. Results from studies in the reading and language literature inform readers of the critical elements of phonemic awareness that predict later reading success. These elements combined with explicit…

Determined that kindergarten children needed more trials to learn a list of similar than dissimilar words but made fewer overgeneralization errors on subsequent transfer tasks. (HOD)

In a paired associate task, readers and prereaders were taught five words as oral responses, each word paired with a distinctive nonsense figure. The results raise doubts about the effectiveness of teaching beginning readers sight vocabulary words printed on flash cards. (RC)

Words in categories of high and low "flash-card learnability" and semantic congruence (logical congruence and associative congruence) were tested. Other independent variables were sex and intelligence (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test). The dependent variable was time in tenths of seconds, from the first presentation of a word list until the…

Concluded that the incorporation of new words into the educable mentally retarded child's reading vocabulary can be enhanced by the phonological pairing of content and function words. (RB)

Thirty learning disabled and thirty nondisabled children (mean age 10 years) were compared on a paired associate learning task that simulated the process of sight word learning. Two instructional variables (response competition and stimulus complexity) that have been hypothesized as contributing to overloading in learning disabled children, were…

Research supported by the Cooperative Research Program of the U.S. Office of Education, CRP-S-378.

In an investigation of the degree to which children learn associations in the direction opposite to the one in which they were taught, 20 preschool children were instructed in letter-sound correspondences in one of two ways. One group was presented with the letter symbol and asked to produce the sound, while the other group was presented with the…

This paper represents an attempt to study the graphemic-phonemic associations that are formed during the acquisition and subsequent retention of beginning reading responses and to evaluate the heuristic value of viewing the formation of these associations as a classical conditioning process. Two experiments--one on first graders and one on first…

This study attempted to answer two questions: should variable or constant grapheme-phoneme correspondence be introduced initially and should paired-associate or conceptual training be used in initial training. (Author/RK)