Using poor and normal readers, three studies evaluated semantic coding and phonological coding deficits as explanations for reading disability. It was concluded that semantic coding deficits are unlikely causes of difficulties in poor readers in early stages but accrue with prolonged reading difficulties in older readers. Phonological coding…

This research synthesis identifies areas of convergence in reading research regarding the importance, dimensions, and effects of phonological awareness on the reading acquisition process. It also highlights similarities and differences between normal achievers and diverse learners. The following five areas of research convergence are identified:…

Although reading has been studied extensively over the past few decades, its measurement and amelioration continues to be problematic. This paper explores the reasons for this within a psycho-educational perspective and offers several new alternative theoretical positions from which to view prose processing and enhancement. Implications for…

Thirty grade 4 subjects were individually tested on a digit span test of working memory capacity (Case and Kurland) and the Reading Span Test (Daneman and Carpenter). The Reading Span Test was administered using sentences at a grade 2, grade 4, and grade 6 reading level. It was predicted that, as the decoding demands of the stimulus sentences in…

In teaching Japanese as a second language, structure should be introduced through the spoken language so the forms are already familiar when the reading begins, just as the native Japanese child masters a syllabic writing system first then learns characters so that the graphic representation occurs within familiar grammatical patterns. (SCC)

Intended to (1) provide new data and reconceptualizations relevant to evolving debates, (2) present summaries of current theoretical positions, and (3) in some cases, to juxtapose radically different opinions in a rapidly growing field, this volume offers a number of views on topics concerning visual word recognition. In chapter 1, Thomas H. Carr…

Research by developmental psychologists has investigated metaphor comprehension without its surrounding context. This research has the positive feature of being unidirectional, all indicating that the older the child, the greater the possibility that metaphor will be understood. The disadvantages of the studies for educators include the fact that…

A probe recall short-term retention task was used to test the applicability of the "phonological recoding" (Conrad, 1972) and "flexible decoding" (Smith, 1972) models to processing tactics used by readers of Chinese. Subjects were 45 adult speakers of Cantonese. Stimuli were lists of Chinese characters which varied in terms of phonological and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between reading comprehension and the perception of syntactic and semantic errors by fourth graders. Forty-eight students were divided according to reading comprehension tests into high and low performance groups. Each student then read orally twelve sentences, of which four were normal…

The primary goal of the conference panel on modeling the reading process was to prepare a programatically related set of suggestions which could lead to a clearer account of reading and to an ability to pose successively better research questions. This panel report contains sections on the development of a model for word recognition during…

Selected by the International Reading Association's Committee on Psycholinguistics and Reading, the papers in this volume were first presented at the 1968 IRA Preconvention Institute: (1) "Reading Is Only Incidentally Visual" (Kolers) suggests that the teaching of reading should move away from the purely visual; (2) "Some Thoughts on Spelling"…

Words were used as the stimulus factors to test the two-stage reading process. The first stage is a decoding stage in which the words are perceived and translated into an acoustic code, and the second stage is a semantic matching stage in which words were categorized into three phonological factors (word length, vowel complexity, and regularity)…

Two types of poor readers are identified and compared with each other and with a comparable group of good readers for performance on a series of metalinguistic tasks. The specific problem underlying each of the two types of poor readers is shown to be related to two separable components of metalinguistic skill. (Author/LMO)

Reports three studies indicating that context has little effect on high school students' ability to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words. (HTH)

Summarizes good reading research published in journals during 1986, focusing on studies that deal with reading comprehension, prior learning, and word recognition. (SRT)