A laboratory and a classroom study were conducted to determine if verbal association learning would be facilitated by visual discrimination training. Kindergarten children who could not recognize the letters used were the subjects for both studies. In the laboratory study, 90 subjects were randomly assigned to the experimental group (E) which got…

The purpose of this Title VI study was to determine which pairs of lowercase alphabet letters were most frequently confused by prereading children and therefore most likely to cause difficulty in initial reading. Two sample groups were used: 50 lower-middle-class kindergarten children with a median age of 6 years and 25 upper-middle-class nursery…

A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE CONCERNING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEASURE OF PREREADING VISUAL DISCRIMINATION AND FIRST-GRADE READING ACHIEVEMENT IS GIVEN. THE RELATIVE PREDICTIVE POWER OF VISUAL DISCRIMINATION OF LETTERS, WORDS, GEOMETRIC DESIGNS, AND PICTURES WHEN THESE ABILITIES ARE STUDIED INDIVIDUALLY AND IN COMBINATION IS INDICATED. STUDIES…

The stimulus properties of the letters b, d, p, and q were investigated in an attempt to demonstrate that the common reversal of these letters by beginning readers is in part determined by the vertical aspect of the stimulus figure. One hundred eighty kindergarteners were randomly selected from a racially mixed population and randomly assigned to…

The purpose of this investigation was to study the effect of controlling the letters used in words both for a training program designed to improve visual discrimination and for a word recognition task. The experiment was designed to investigate the influence of simultaneous and successive discrimination learning with stimuli which varied in…

Two experiments were designed to study the relative importance of various letter segments in letter recognition. One experiment was conducted with 24 subjects and the English alphabet, the other with 15 subjects and the Hebrew alphabet. In each experiment a letter was presented for identification, but was preceded by a brief presentation of either…

Strategies children use when they recognize words were explored. To measure the effectiveness of two different methods of training children to attend to the critical features of letters, 40 first-grade urban children were presented two pairs of letters (similar and dissimilar) simultaneously or successively. Unexpectedly, it was found that with…

This study investigated alternate methods of letter discrimination pretraining and word recognition training in young children. Seventy kindergarten children were trained to recognize eight printed words in a vocabulary list by a mixed-list paired-associate method. Four of the stimulus words had visual response choices (pictures) and four had…

Forty kindergarten children were randomly assigned to four conditions to investigate the influence of criterion level on the discrimination of highly confusable letters in beginning reading. Half the subjects were exposed to simultaneous, and half to successive discriminations. The groups were equally divided as to criterion level, i.e., four vs.…

The purpose of this study was to determine if the relationships among alphabet skills, auditory discrimination, and visual discrimination for five-year-olds prior to kindergarten were similar to those found in studies of subskills of first grade children. The sample consisted of 23 middle class nursery school children between the ages of 5.1 and…

The assumption that the learning of letter names in their proper sequence is a prerequisite for literacy can be questioned. There is disagreement over the value of early letter-name training. It is variously said to aid in letter or word discrimination, to aid in attaching sounds to letters, and to interfere with both of these tasks. An analysis…

The hypothesis that word context reduces visual rather than acoustic confusion between possible targets was tested in a series of experiments. All involved tachistoscopic presentation of letter strings followed by a pattern mask. Data from eight college students showed that target letters that are confusable only visually and acoustically…

A study investigated the size of the perceptual span within which adults use visual information to distinguish among letters as they read. The eye movements of fifteen college students were monitored as they read passages from a cathode-ray tube. On occasional fixations, letters in specified visual regions were replaced by other letters. The…