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…

Ten randomly picked children of prekindergarten age participated in a study that focused on whether feature analysis can be used as an aid in the recognition of the alphabet. The five children in the control group were introduced to the letters as a whole, while the five children in the experimental group were introduced to the whole letters but…

The role of visual imagery in the learning of letter-sound combinations was investigated using such mediating images as two scoops of ice cream for the letter "m." In a preliminary study, high-, medium-, and low-strength mediating images were determined for each letter-sound combination. The 216 kindergarten subjects in the main study were…

The role of visual imagery in the learning of letter-sound combinations was investigated using such mediating images as two scoops of ice cream for the letter "m." In a preliminary study, high-, medium-, and low-strength mediating images were determined for each letter-sound combination. The 216 kindergarten subjects in the main study were…

As part of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, a study was devised to test the project's materials and procedures. Selected by a pretest, four kindergarten children, with no prior reading instruction, were taught the same reading content using the initial teaching alphabet for a…

As part of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, the second phase of a preliminary study was devised that modified the pretest, the instructional modes and format, the sequence and amount of information presented in the instructional sessions, and the procedures for testing and…

Summarizing the final phase of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, this report presents both general and individual findings derived from the analyses of the children's performance over the course of a year. The first section discusses the following general topics related to the…

Four paradoxes appear in research on learning to read: (1) the ability to name letters is a good predictor of reading readiness, yet letter-naming training does not help children learn how to read; (2) visual discrimination is often better in poor readers than in good readers; (3) learning to read two languages is easier than learning to read one;…