Finds that perceptual identification of target words explicitly presented was significantly higher than that of new targets and that targets inferred to maintain coherence and targets predicted by the text were identified as well as explicit targets and significantly better than targets schematically appropriate to the text. (SR)

Discusses the hyperbole surrounding statements and testimonials about the effectiveness of phonics instruction. Suggests that reading is more than sounding out words one at a time and that most children figure it out for themselves with little or no help. Suggests that reading is also more than a psycholinguistic guessing game. (RS)

Uses an error detection paradigm to examine the use of different standards of evaluation in younger and older adults who are skilled or less skilled at evaluating their understanding. Finds that skilled readers more often detect falsehoods and inconsistencies than nonsense words, whereas less skilled readers more often detect nonsense words and…

Assesses early interactive processes of development in reading, spelling, and implicit and explicit phonological awareness in a group of children at four time-points as they progressed through their first three years in school. Finds that results describe the ways in which spelling acts as a mediator for the influence of explicit phonological…

Discusses the following visual needs of learning: acuity, accommodation, neuromuscular coordination, visual motor integration, and other related factors. Urges professionals of all areas to pool their resources so that teachers can become more knowledgeable of certain information regarding the visual process that affects a student's learning…

Notes that reading research has advanced from notions that reading is a visual-perception task of word recognition and decoding to more precise psycho- and neurolinguistic models of language and literacy. Concludes that reading is a skill that develops to an automatic level depending on the degree to which the individual can access phonemic and…

Focuses on inferential processes in reading and the question of whether those processes are automatic. Examines the importance of inference generation during reading comprehension. Describes research that investigates which inferences appear to be automatic. Discusses characteristics of skilled reading that are related to the automaticity of…

Three experiments, using text designed to suggest two causal interpretations, examined second and fourth graders' recognition of interpretive ambiguity. Found that older children were more likely than younger children to report two interpretations, with initial interpretations reflecting the most recently encountered causal information. Second…

The mechanisms underlying nonword pronunciation have a been a focus of debates over dual-route and connectionist models of reading aloud. The present study examined two aspects of nonword naming: spelling-sound consistency effects and variability in the pronunciations assigned to ambiguous nonwords such as MOUP. Performance of a parallel…

Using a priming procedure, 4 experiments were carried out to investigate the effects of a short preexposure of a prime that was a radical or contained radicals identical to the target. Significant facilitation was found when the target contained the prime as a radical, although only for low-frequency targets which did not arise merely as a result…

This research study had two purposes, (a) to design and develop a Web-based learning environment that supports the use of a set of reading strategies, and (b) to investigate the impact of this Web-based learning environment on readers' "memory" and "understanding" of an instructional unit on the human heart (Dwyer &…

As a result of the Reading First Program of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the view of reading has narrowed. Individual state's Reading First professional development programs, and hence reading teachers across the United States, have spent the six years since the funding of the program in 2002 focusing beginning and developmental reading on…

Today more than ever, educators are challenged to meet the literacy needs of all learners in increasingly diverse classrooms. To help them meet this challenge, author Susan E. Israel, shows how to use metacognitive assessments to adapt literacy instruction to elementary students' individual needs. This book supplies teachers with easy access to…

The most prominent theories of reading consider reading comprehension ability to be a direct consequence of lower-level reading skills. Recently however, research has shown that some children with poor comprehension ability perform normally on tests of lower-level skills (e.g., decoding). One promising line of behavioral research has found…

We investigated processing of metaphoric sentences using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Seventeen healthy subjects (6 female, 11 male) read 60 novel short German sentence pairs with either metaphoric or literal meaning and performed two different tasks: judging the metaphoric content and judging whether the sentence…