Application of psycholinguistic insights initiated a long career researching how children learn to read words. A theory was proposed claiming that spellings of individual words are stored in memory when their graphemes become bonded to phonemes in their pronunciations along with meanings, and this enables readers to read stored words automatically…

A hallmark of skilled reading is recognizing written words automatically from memory by sight. How beginning readers attain this skill is explained. They must acquire foundational knowledge, including phonemic segmentation, grapheme-phoneme knowledge, decoding, and spelling skills. When these skills are applied, spellings of words become bonded to…

Studies have shown that children benefit from a spelling pronunciation strategy in remembering the spellings of words. The current study determined whether this strategy also helps adults learn to spell commonly misspelled words. Participants were native English speaking college students (N = 42), mean age 22.5 years (SD = 7.87). An experimental…

First and second graders were taught to recognize a set of written words either more accurately or more rapidly. Both before and after word training, they named pictures printed with and without these words as distractors. Of interest was whether training would enhance or diminish the interference created by these words in the picture naming task.…

Investigates the kind of print-related knowledge that emergent readers must possess to learn to point to the words of a text as they recite it from memory (fingerpoint-reading) and to remember information about the print from this activity. Reveals that different types of print knowledge facilitate different aspects of fingerpoint-reading. (SR)

Identifies five phases of development to distinguish the course of word reading; notes each phase is characterized by students' working knowledge of the alphabetic system, which is central for acquiring word reading skill. Explains the usefulness of this information for teachers of problem readers. Explains the processes that students acquire in…

Takes a closer look at the reading skills of beginning readers who are able to read words by analogy. Finds that reading unfamiliar words by analogy to known words is an easier process and can be executed by beginners more readily than reading unfamiliar words by phonologically recoding the words. (MG)

Mnemonic value of spellings in a paired-associate sound learning task was examined in first and second graders. Learning was fastest when correct spellings were seen or imagined. The preferred interpretation was that spellings are effective because they provide readers with orthographic images for symbolizing and storing sounds in memory.…

This study compares the reading achievement of beginning readers in kindergarten who were assigned to two reading groups: (1) cipher readers and (2) phonetic-cue readers. Results showed that the first group did better in both reading and spelling. The importance of beginning readers advancing beyond cue reading to cipher reading is emphasized.…

Results of a study in which first graders learned ten unfamiliar function words in two different formats indicated that sentence readers learned more about the syntactic and semantic identities of function words, whereas list readers remembered their orthographic identities better and could pronounce the words faster and more accurately in…

Using kindergarten subjects, a study examined whether prereaders learned better with visual cues while novice readers learned better with phonetic cues. (HOD)

Investigates whether prereaders who knew all their letters are better at forming logographic access routes than letter-sound access routes into memory from words read by sight. Concludes that prereaders become capable of forming letter-sound access routes when they learn letters well enough to take advantage of the phonetic cues the letters…

Research on children's oral reading errors provides evidence that both top down and bottom up processes interactively contribute to reading. Syntactic and semantic expectations are sources of information for top down processing, while knowledge of letter-sound relations provides information for bottom up processing. As children learn to read,…

Focusing on research about children's acquisition of reading and spelling skills, this paper discusses the larger picture of reading acquisition, issues addressed by research, and results of this research. The paper cites numerous studies on the subject, including studies on whether environmental print experiences enable young children to process…