A study examined variables that affect the acquisition of automaticity of verbal skills. Among the variables examined were practice, novelty or familiarity of a word or word category, the speed and efficiency with which persons acquire automaticity, reaction time, and number of tasks performed concurrently. Subjects, 30 sixth and seventh grade…

A study was conducted to determine if increasing the redundancy of sections in scientific articles where typical readers became bored or confused would have a desirable effect on other readers. Undergraduate journalism students applied R. F. Carter's signalled stopping technique to two different science articles by indicating points where they…

The "primacy of reading" hypothesis as the explanation for the high correlation between children's competencies in literacy and numeracy is rejected in this paper. Instead, a "primacy of speech perception" hypothesis is examined. It is suggested that analysis-by-synthesis speech recognition procedures are acquired in early childhood and that the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which problem analysis facilitated the subsequent processing of expository text, both for novices and a comparison group. A text on osmosis consisted of six-pages and was used as reading material. The ninth-grade students were considered novices because they were unfamiliar with the…

Prompted by the growing interest in the role of reader-related and text-related variables in reading comprehension, a study compared 30 sixth grade students in regular classrooms to 30 language impaired students. The purpose was to assess the relationship of (1) text structure manipulations for simple and complex sentence structure, (2) discourse…

A study was conducted into the operation of an interactive-compensatory model of reading. Specifically, it examined the development of context-free word recognition skills, their role in contextual reading, and the degree to which one word recognition skill might compensate another. Four word factors were examined: (1) orthographic redundancy (the…

As part of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, a screening test was designed to aid in the selection of the four kindergarten children who were to participate in the project. Consisting of seven parts, the test asked each child to do the following tasks: write his/her name; isolate…

Traditional ways of teaching French literary narrative have greatly relied on the use of metalanguage. Modern teaching practice, in rejecting this technique, leads to questions about what to substitute for it. An experiment was carried out in which over 20 groups of from 20 to 35 intermediate-level students in French-medium schools were instructed…

Separate experiments investigated parietal lobe malfunction; developmental v acquired dyslexia; whole-word, syllabic, and alphabetical reading ability; phonological recoding; and spelling. Reading processes and memory of normal and aphasic children were compared. (CP)

Explores and enumerates best practice in the upper elementary and middle grades regarding word identification, including phonics and other subskills. Identifies 16 word identification strategies to attain eventual comprehension, including focusing on consonants, word sorting, chunking, and word building. Identifies less effective strategies such…

An Israeli study determined what happens when persons with low-literacy levels read news accounts that presuppose general knowledge that the writer expects them to have, but that they may not necessarily possess. The study sample consisted of about 600 students, mostly women, in 30 literacy centers throughout the country. In each class, adult…

If a student is to develop reading comprehension, he must possess and activate a number of linguistic and cognitive skills. He comes to the text with certain expectations and uses a cyclical process of sampling, predicting, testing, and confirming to understand it. The overall goal of reading instruction is to produce motivated, independent,…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether good and poor readers of the same age levels differed in their performance on a task which required the integration of semantic-syntactic and grapho-phonic information. Fifteen fourth grade good readers, 15 fourth grade poor readers, and 15 second grade good readers read six sentences that had one…

Prereading assessment was first used to predict school readiness and was an assessment of the child's visual and oral vocabulary skills. By the 1970s, readiness assessment had changed from assessment of a child's developmental probability for success or failure in reading to an assessment of the child's skill development in relation to the reading…

Presents results of tested theoretical models of the development of print concepts and word reading. Indicates that children expand their knowledge in each of the following print components with age: print, graphic awareness, phonemic awareness, grapheme-phoneme correspondence knowledge, and word reading components. (NKA)