Lexical stress plays a critical role in multisyllabic word reading in English. However, assignment of English lexical stress, which is neither fixed nor marked in writing, can pose significant challenges for English learners and has not been well-understood. The present study aims to fill the research gap by studying sensitivity to lexical stress…

Children struggle with the resolution of pronouns during reading, but little is known about the sources of their difficulties. We conducted a longitudinal eye tracking experiment with 70 children in the final years of primary school. The children read sentences with a contextual resolution preference in which gender was either an informative…

This article presents 34 characteristics of texts and tasks ("text features") that can make continuous (prose), noncontinuous (document), and quantitative texts easier or more difficult for adolescents and adults to comprehend and use. The text features were identified by examining the assessment tasks and associated texts in the national…

Two experiments combined a spatial cueing manipulation (valid vs. invalid spatial cues) with a stimulus repetition manipulation (repeated vs. nonrepeated) in order to assess the hypothesis that familiar items need less spatial attention than less familiar ones. The magnitude of the effect of cueing on reading aloud time for items that were…

Two experiments examined the influence of phonological and semantic processes on 4- to 6-year olds' ability to learn to read words. Results indicated that children learned phonetic cues better than control cues and that learning was influenced by both the phonetic properties of the cue and the imageability of the words used. (Author/KB)

Four experiments examined influence of task demands on 5- to 9-year olds' and adults' reading strategy. Results showed that less-skilled readers predominantly used simple grapheme-phoneme-level correspondences in reading isolated unfamiliar items. Skilled readers more likely adopted an analogy strategy. The "clue word" technique yielded…

A review of the literature on miscue analysis supports the assumption that reading is a language process. All three language cue systems--graphophonic, syntactic, and semantic--must interact if reading for meaning is to occur, and a whole language environment is necessary for a student to develop reading proficiency. (AEA)

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between reading comprehension and the perception of syntactic and semantic errors by fourth graders. Forty-eight students were divided according to reading comprehension tests into high and low performance groups. Each student then read orally twelve sentences, of which four were normal…

Fifth-grade learning disabled and skilled readers (N=32) were compared on verbal dichotic listening tasks for free recall and cued recall of word lists organized by semantic, phonemic, and structural features. Results indicated that disabled readers were comparable on free recall but were inferior to skilled readers on cued recall. (Author/JW)

A study compared two groups of failing first grade readers in the Reading Recovery program to determine what effect this type of instruction had over time on their reading patterns. Subjects, 60 failing first grade readers, 30 learning disabled (LD) children and 30 non-LD children, were randomly selected from urban, suburban, and rural elementary…

Examines the nature and prevalence of author-provided cues to effective processing of introductory college textbooks in psychology and biology. Concludes that the authors of the texts chose cues that would be effective even with relatively passive learners and rarely chose cues that demanded much activity from readers. (SKC)