Reports an experiment on the rapid naming of printed letter strings by third- and fifth-grade Yugoslavian children. As is consistent with previous experiments on adults, the phonologically ambiguous form of a word or pseudoword was named much more slowly than the phonologically unambiguous form. (Author/BE)

Compared two teaching strategies, delayed-prompting and fading, for teaching the most easily confused letters and numbers to preschoolers (N=39). The results indicated that children who received discrimination training using delayed prompting made fewer errors on the posttests for the letters and numbers mastered than did children taught via…

Research studies how visual information and redundancy contribute to letter and word identification. (Authors)

Three experiments are described which were designed to explore the usefulness of the three principles of abbreviation and to examine the effects of certain stimulus variables. (Authors/CB)

Part 1 appeared in the October-November 1971 issue of Yelmo." (DS)

A strategy developed in Bulgaria for instruction in the Russian alphabet is described and discussed, and instructional materials are listed. The technique, based on suggestopedic methods, teaches letters not separately but as parts of words and sentences, and no comparisons are made with the Latin alphabet. (MSE)

Two experiments examined the perceptual processing of letters embedded within one- and two-syllable words and visually similar nonwords. Results suggest that (1) the size of compelling perceptual units seems limited, and (2) unit size is not necessarily related to the correspondence between letter order and pronounceability. (Author/BW)

An encoding algorithm uses empirically determined confusion matrices to activate units in an alphabetum and a lexicon to predict performance of word, orthographically regular nonword, or irregular nonword recognition. Performance is enhanced when decisions are based on lexical information which constrains test letter identity. Word prediction…

Examines the development of knowledge of orthographic structure among beginning readers by testing their ability to discern which word in a pair looked most like a word. (HOD)

Reports that kindergarten children were aided in learning to use the alphabet when additional cues to distinguish the letters were provided in the immediate letter background. (FL)

Reviews the research on the initial teaching alphabet (i/t/a), the sources of conflict and misunderstanding involving its use, and its future in reading instruction. (FL)

Examination of reversal errors made by 203 Black and 198 White normal first graders indicated that reversals on items with semantic content correlated very highly with reversals on items with figural content. Each type of reversal item was equally effective as a predictor of end-of-first-grade reading achievement. (Author/SJL)