We show that the neurological condition of synaesthesia--which causes fundamental differences in perception and cognition throughout a lifetime--is significantly represented within the childhood population, and that it manifests behavioural markers as young as age 6 years. Synaesthesia gives rise to a merging of cognitive and/or sensory functions…

A study was conducted to shed light on the influence which children's developmental stage in learning to read and the reading instruction they receive have on first-graders' reading concepts. The study provided descriptive information to answer the following questions: (1) Do children from literature-based and skill-based instructional settings…

Ninety pupils in grades one through three, half English speaking and half Spanish speaking, were administered informal reading inventories in their respective countries. Analysis of variance was used to determine whether significant differences existed between decoding errors of pupils in both countries. Results are discussed. (Author/MT)

Trains 94 first graders using a structured phonological reading method emphasizing English phonology and phoneme/grapheme correspondence. Compares to a control group who received a whole-language-plus-phonics approach. Notes that children in all groups improved their phonological awareness by the same amount. Concludes that phonological awareness…

A study was designed to investigate the auditory-visual integrative abilities of primary grade children for five long vowels and five short vowels. The Vowel Integration Test (VIT), composed of 35 nonsense words having all the long and short vowel sounds, was administered to students in 64 schools over a period of two years. Students' indications…

Gives advanced and novice readers in grade one and older disabled readers nonword reading and spelling tasks. Finds that disabled readers read as many nonwords and spelled as many words as beginning readers, indicating equivalent alphabetic knowledge. Finds that disabled readers took significantly more trials to read 16 target words, indicating…

Assesses speed, accuracy, and types of errors in decoding lists of words and pseudo words and performance in two phonemic awareness tasks for first- and second-grade German and American children. Suggests that successful reading in English depends upon more complex grapheme to phoneme correspondence rules than does reading in German. (SC)

Concludes that less proficient readers, in general, are less able to use graphophonic cues and may rely more on contextual cues than proficient readers.

The spelling skills of grade three children who had received whole-language instruction since they began to learn to read were compared with those of grade three children attending a phonics program. Overall, the phonics group produced more accurate word spellings than the whole-language group. In addition, the phonics children's spelling of…

A study examined the phoneme-grapheme correspondence in native English-speaking kindergartners' spelling and compared it to the results of similar research with Spanish-speaking children. It tested the hypothesis that English-speaking children make their first grapheme-sound correspondences differently because of phonological differences in the…

Noting that children in literate societies all learn the sound-symbol relationships of their languages but that orthographies, sound-symbol relationships, and societal attitudes toward literacy differ, the essays in this book explore both the universal and the culturally constrained aspects of the process of learning to read. Following an…

A study examined the degree to which children with limited English proficiency can benefit from English instruction in phonemic awareness and phoneme-grapheme correspondence. Subjects were 27 kindergarten children in a suburban northern California school--16 spoke Hmong as their primary language and the rest were monolingual English speakers. The…

The instruction provided by two beginning reading programs (the Ginn 720 and the Palo Alto 1973 reading programs) are analyzed and compared in this paper on the basis of such factors as phoneme-grapheme correspondence and phonics instruction, sight word learning, and the development of reading comprehension. The comparison focuses primarily on the…