Recently, there has been growing concern about how to most effectively support the literacy development of beginning and struggling readers with regard to helping them learn to effortlessly identify the huge number of words that proficient readers ultimately learn to read with automaticity. Some, noting the critical importance of phonics…

This narrative review discusses quantitative indices measuring differences between alphabetic languages that are related to the process of word recognition. The specific orthography that a child is acquiring has been identified as a central element influencing reading acquisition and dyslexia. However, the development of reliable metrics to…

Current models of normal reading behavior emphasize not only the recognition and processing of the word being fixated (n) but also processing of the upcoming parafoveal word (n + 1). Gaze contingent displays employing the boundary paradigm often mask words in order to understand how much and what type of processing is completed on the parafoveal…

Three eye movement experiments were conducted to examine the role of letter identity and letter position during reading. Before fixating on a target word within each sentence, readers were provided with a parafoveal preview that differed in the amount of useful letter identity and letter position information it provided. In Experiments 1 and 2,…

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…

This study investigated (1) whether symbol-symbol correspondences are learned better when imbedded in whole words or when presented individually and (2) the effect of these two instructional methods on transfer from an experimental transitional writing system (TWS) to traditional orthography (TO). Thirty-five undergraduates were randomly assigned…

One of the most widely respected features of English orthography is its sequential redundancy. Its psychological reality is evidenced by the relative ease with which good readers can encode sequentially redundant nonwords as compared to arbitrary strings of letters. Its psychological importance is implicated by evidence that this advantage is…

Four experiments investigated the phenomenon of letter migration, the tendency of readers to assign letters from one word to another appearing in close proximity. The experiments, which involved college undergraduate students, revealed several properties of letter migration, including the following: (1) migrations are more frequent when the words…

In order to determine the effect of grapheme-phoneme correspondence on beginning reading, word acquisition as related to the degree of regularity of the word was used as a measurement. Twenty children enrolled in a preschool project for culturally disadvantaged children at Peabody College were randomly assigned to two groups. One group used the…

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…

Examines the development of knowledge of orthographic structure among beginning readers by testing their ability to discern which word in a pair looked most like a word. (HOD)

Reports that kindergarten children were aided in learning to use the alphabet when additional cues to distinguish the letters were provided in the immediate letter background. (FL)

Reports on an investigation of the role of letter and order information in lexical access, using an interference paradigm in a lexical decision task. (Author/AM)