Reviews recent investigations that analyze the word-recognition responses of children taught by different methods and reanalyzes the results of W. Wiley's 1928 naturalistic experiment in order to deduce the nature of the process underlying the learning of words. (Author/CS)

Three reading procedures for learning isolated words--whole-word, syllable-blending, and phonics-blending--were examined to determine which was the most effective for preschool children. The six preschool children in the study were divided into two groups to assess the effects of the length and number of different letters in a series of training…