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,…

The present study was designed to determine whether alphabet letters facilitate the acquisition of phoneme segmentation skill and to test the assumption that letters make it harder for prereaders to learn segmentation than nondistinctively marked visual aids. (Author/PN)

A highly reproducible scale of difficulty of word identification tasks was identified for both good and poor readers: consonant-vowel combinations and short vowel words were learned first. Long vowel words, special rule words, and nonsense words were more difficult. Reading instruction should parallel this sequence since it follows learning…