A study was conducted to examine the influence of topic familiarity on good and poor readers' ability to identify and use important information in expository texts. Subjects were 56 eighth grade students and 37 adults. After indicating their familiarity with the topics of eight experimental passages using J. P. Guilford's method of paired…

This is a final report of research in dichotic listening performance (DLP). The purposes for the research were to study the development of DLP in children and adults, to examine DLP as a function of verbal information presented in a task, to determine the contribution of perceptual and mnemonic factors affecting DLP by controlling order-of-report…

Psychological research has identified a number of cognitive processes and language abilities that are involved in the development of reading skills. This paper examines the ways in which research findings relate to current curriculum practices in such areas as learning letters and sounds; developing auditory perception skills; word recognition;…

This paper examines the relationship between strategies for recall of verbal material and the reading ability of 10-to-13-year-old children. Sixty-five fifth and sixth graders, whose reading levels were determined by the Gates-MacGinitie Comprehension Test (1964), were given an orally presented word-string repetition task. While performance on…

Forty-six first-grade teachers' manuals and workbooks from three basal reading series published in the 1930s, 1950s, and 1970s were examined for differences in the amount of material devoted to word-attack skills. Word-attack skills were defined as the use of phonic and structural analysis for successfully attacking unrecognized words. Results…

This special issue focuses on the nature of the reading process, the nature of language, and the nature of the relationships between them. Specific topics discussed include the bias of language in speech and writing, the functions of language, trends in second-language-acquisition research, learning about psycholinguistic processes by analyzing…

A 2 x 3 factorial design was employed to assess the efficacy of peer teaching and token reward contingencies (contingent tokens, noncontingent "yoked" tokens, and no tokens) in a remedial reading program. The relationship between on-task performance and reading improvement was also assessed. Forty-two fourth grade to sixth grade rural Appalachian…

Two readability formulas were applied to two math and two reading series textbooks at the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade levels to see whether the publishers' suggested reading levels were accurate. Five samples were taken from each text and compared to the publishers' suggested usage according to grade level. Results showed that although formulas…

Three experiments, in which subjects read passages of variable readability, measured "cognitive capacity usage" (the attention level to reading material) by recording by subjects reaction times in a secondary task (responding to a "click"). The data indicated that the easy texts filled cognitive capacity more completely than the difficult texts,…

In a study of the way adult basic education (ABE) students answer different kinds of questions about what they read, 221 students were asked to read ten passages during a ten-week period and to answer ten questions about each passage immediately after reading it. Each set of questions included three dealing with facts, three dealing with word…

Responses to a questionnaire sent to 768 public school districts in the state of New York form the basis of this report on current practices in reading education. Each district was asked to define the terms "developmental,""corrective," and "remedial," and to comment on the availability of programs that fit each of…

The shift from viewing reading as primarily a perceptual process to viewing it as primarily a linguistic process, combined with the consideration of reading failure as not one but many disabilities, formed the basis for the assumption that there exists a duo-symbiosis between reading and speech and between speech and word-finding. The development…

This study compared the rapid word processing abilities of groups of students in college, fourth grade, second grade, and kindergarten to see if there is a developmental pattern in such skill development, and to see if phonics training should emphasize either letters and the orthographic rules that create words or letter clusters (common words)…

An instructional program that teaches decoding skills to learning disabled children was developed to serve as a supplement to whatever reading program is used in the classroom. As a result of task analysis, the program's instructional sequence begins with auditory tasks analyzing syllables and short words into phonemes, then blending these…

"Project Assist," conducted in two elementary schools and one junior high school, tested the hypothesis that students in schools with trained instructional reading aides will read better than students in schools with either untrained aides or no aides. This report presents data on the project gathered during the 1974-1975 school year.…