Describes research projects and experiments in graphic design conducted at a number of colleges and universities. (GT)

Concludes that, of several reading readiness factors, knowledge of alphabet letter names is the best predictor of phonics skills other than vowel recognition and of reading abilities involving words in insolation, and that number knowledge is the best predictor of reading abilities involving words and syntax. (FL)

Examined effects of orthographic context on the letter recognition skills of dyslexic children, comparing their performance to that of adults and of chronological and reading age-matched groups. Results showed that the two matched groups showed strong word superiority effect (WSE) for words and pseudowords over nonwords. Dyslexic readers did not…

Reponses of poor, average, and good spellers at different age levels to a phonemic segmentation test containing nondigraph pseudowords and to an experimental spelling test containing exception, ambiguous, regular, and pseudowords suggested that the average and good spellers made fewer and more phonetically accurate errors than the poor spellers.…

Assesses illiterate and semiliterate speakers of Serbo-Croatian on reading, writing, phonological, and control tasks. Three groups, categorized with respect to the subjects' ability to identify the letters of their Cyrillic alphabet, differed on phoneme deletion and phoneme-counting tasks, but not on syllable-counting, picture vocabulary, or…

Discusses bibliographic access to documents in nonroman scripts and the need for standards for the way different scripts are encoded for data processing. A microcomputer-based system that transliterates Cyrillic text to a romanized version and back to Cyrillic is proposed. (10 references) (MES)

Examined phonological skills of children during their first two years of learning to read. Found that segmentation was strongly correlated with reading and spelling attainment at the end of the first year of school; letter-name knowledge predicted reading and spelling skill and interacted with segmentation skills. Rhyming predicted spelling skills…

To test whether cognitive processing in bilingual depends on script combinations and language proficiency, this study investigated the development of alphabetic and logographic visual search strategies in two kinds of biscriptals: (1) Malay-English and (2) Chinese-English readers. Results support the view that there are script implications of…

Five adult humans were tested for emergent conditional discriminations under rapid-responding contingencies. During four-comparison matching-to-sample baseline training (AB and AC), limited-hold contingencies for responding to samples and comparisons were gradually restricted to the shortest duration consistent with at least 95% accuracy and no…

Two studies investigated the importance of phoneme awareness relative to other predictors in the development of reading and spelling among children learning a consistent orthography (Czech) and an inconsistent orthography (English). In Study 1, structural equation models revealed that Czech (n=107) and English (n=71) data were fitted well by the…

This study compared literacy learning for kindergartners as 12 teachers read 10 popular alphabet books aloud, emphasizing meanings or phonemes, and used centers for independent practice with an alphabet book on audiotape or CD-ROM over a period of four weeks. Researchers taught half the teachers to read the books with an emphasis on phonemes…

Developmental stages in reading English words were examined among 118 Chinese children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 from a working-class elementary school in Tianjin, China. Proficiency in Chinese and English, ability to make orthographic analogies in both languages, and strategies in reading English words were assessed. Results suggest that Chinese…

The validity of the suggestion that dyslexic children make more letter reversal errors than other children was tested. Horizontal letter reversals of 8- to 11-year-old dyslexic children, nondyslexic speech- or language-impaired (SLI) children, and nonimpaired children in the context of individual letters, words, words spelled out letter-by-letter,…

A discussion of spelling instruction for learners of English as a second language (ESL) looks at writing systems, the literature of ESL instruction, and the literature of English language arts in general. It begins with a typology of writing systems, examining how they represent both grammatical and phonological features. The nature of English…

Intended for use by teachers, this guide suggests classroom techniques for using "Write Now," an Apple II program with music, motion, and pictures, to facilitate the teaching of manuscript handwriting skills to elementary school students. "Write Now" shows the student how to form curves and lines when writing letters of the…