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…

The ability to recognize letter patterns within words as a single unit is important for fluent reading. This skill is based on previously established memory representations of common letter patterns. The ability to form these memory representations may be impaired in some poor readers, particularly readers with naming speed deficits (NSD). This…

Suggests that preinstructional evaluation in the areas of mental age, auditory memory, letter names, and the use of context-auditory clues would aid in making predictive, diagnostic judgments as to later reading achievement. (VJ)

Differences in perceptual processes of good and poor readers relevant to single word perception have been studied in a series of experiments. The major differences between good and poor readers have been shown to occur at the level of the single word; other differences occur in knowledge of spelling patterns and ability to make use of letters'…