Contrasts good and poor readers' text recall while listening and while reading aloud to determine if poor readers have a decoding problem, a comprehension problem, or both. Finds no significant difference in listening comprehension between good and poor readers for either easy or difficult texts. (MM)

Studies of intensive phonics instruction are related to the issue of hyperlexia. Evidence on the incidence, frequency, and characteristics of hyperlexia does not support allegations that intensive phonics instruction interferes with development of reading comprehension skills. Hyperlexic children exhibit many symptoms of neurological impairment…

Describes the "Magic E," a game designed for small groups to practice decoding skills. (MM)

First-graders' responses to a battery assessing phonemic awareness, syntactic awareness, receptive vocabulary, word decoding ability, and reading comprehension ability revealed strong zero-order correlations among all the variables, although analysis revealed that metalinguistic ability did not contribute to the prediction of early reading…

Discusses research that supports the view that early phonological awareness affects children's ability to exploit the alphabetic system, and so to develop a sublexical route from print to sound to meaning. Discusses implications for teachers. (RS)

Explores whether or not beginning readers of Chinese (first and third graders) activate phonological codes while reading Chinese characters. Finds that subjects used phonological codes while reading. (RS)

Two experiments were conducted to investigate possible deficiencies in strategies used for decoding words by 20 children (ages 20-12) with intellectual disabilities. Results indicated that subjects did not make use of information in words (specifically letter position cues) to aid in their identification, whereas beginning and experienced…

This study examined the degree to which 31 13-year-old children with learning disabilities were comparable to younger reading and spelling matched controls in (1) phonological similarity effects, (2) phonetically based misspellings, and (3) relationships between memory and spelling performance. An overreliance on phonological codes was found for…

Naming speed skills of 45 dyslexic children (mean ages=8, 13, and 17) and slow learning children (mean age=10) were compared with those of normally achieving children. Results indicated that children with dyslexia and slow learners have persistent and severe problems in naming speed for all stimuli, regardless of whether the stimulus requires…

Discusses development and implementation of an approach to decoding in which students use words they know to decode those they do not know. Discusses how an analogy approach was implemented in a tutorial setting. Offers guidelines for how the approach can be used in regular classrooms, including whole language classrooms. (RS)

The types of vocabulary in three short novels were analyzed to determine the text coverage of the most frequent 2,000 words of English, and the vocabulary needed to gain 97-98% coverage of the running words in each text. It was found that a 5,000-word vocabulary was necessary for adequate coverage in pleasure reading. (Contains nine references.)…

Demonstrates theoretical and practical limitations of traditional subgroup classifications of acquired and developmental dyslexia. Suggests a process-analytic approach, a variant of a dual-route model for word processing. Demonstrates the usefulness of the approach in two cases of "auditory" dyslexics. (RS)

This study, involving 54 first-grade children, found that correlations between decoding and phonological awareness were generally much higher than correlations obtained for measures of decoding and verbal and nonverbal intelligence. Several phonological awareness tasks identified good and poor decoders, with approximately 80-90% accuracy. (DB)

Investigates relationships between verbal and visual short-term memory (STM) and the acquisition of decoding from the pre-reading through the early acquisition stages in 63 Hebrew-speaking children over a three-year period. Finds that visual parameters may make a crucial contribution to the acquisition of decoding skills, and the size of…

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)