The ability of 50 lower middle-class and 25 upper middle-class prereading children to discriminate between pairs of uppercase alphabet letters was tested. A set of 3x5 cards with a sample stimulus in the upper center section of each card and two alternative choice stimuli just below and to the right and left of the sample was used. The 650 total…

Describes a study of the visual discrimination abilities of children who varied in their ability to recognize words. Indicates that visual discrimination skills of the type needed to discriminate between single artificial graphemes do not seem essential for the word recognition aspect of reading. (TJ)

Demonstrates that discrimination training with verbal materials (words and letters) is generally more helpful than training with non-verbal forms. (RB)

Suggests color highlighting as an effective method of improving word recognition visual discrimination skills. (RB)

This paper reports initial results in the development of an inventory to measure visual reading difficulties. The instrument, called the Word Preference Inventory (WPI), asks the subject to choose between pairs of stimulus pseudo-words the one most like a given target word. An analysis of responses to the WPI from 922 children in grades K-6 and…

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…

A proposal that the normal reader does not pay attention to individual letters but to sets of features which are characteristic of a word as a whole is presented and tested in this investigation. It was hypothesized that the reader learns (1) to extract distinctive feature information simultaneously from several parts of the configuration and (2)…

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which a preassessment of motor development and perceptual skills predicts achievement in word recognition for kindergarten children. The instruments used for evaluation were the Lincoln-Oseretsky Motor Development Scale, Thurstone's Identical Forms Test, Wepman Auditory Discrimination Test,…

Presents results of an investigation of visual cues which lead to word and letter recognition. (SL)

Presents computational and psychophysical evidence in support of a theory of one of the earliest stages of visual processing in reading--the isolation of words in text. (HOD)

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…

In an earlier study, subjects who were shown the two words "inside" and "consult" at two different points in a study list of two syllable words were willing to accept the word "insult" as having been on the study list. It was concluded that each syllable had a representation in memory over and beyond the semantic factors which are normally…

Sixty-four preschool children were individually trained on a task requiring them to recognize an isolated phoneme in a word context. A learning set design encompassing 192 trials over eight days was employed. The major factors investigated were: the presence of a redundant visual cue; phoneme type (stop vs. continuant); phoneme position (initial…