Explores issue of whether beginning readers proceed from print directly to meaning, or whether they need to use phonological information to obtain access to the meaning of printed words. As derived from a group of children between seven and 12, results indicated that, at least at low levels of reading skill, intermediate phonemic codes are used in…

Preschool, second-, and sixth-grade children performed developmentally gradated, easy and difficult visual discrimination tasks in a quiet room or with one of two levels of extraneous auditory stimulation. Subjects' errors, response latencies, and glances away from the task were recorded. (Author/RH)

To assess the teachability of conditional logic structure, the commonly used syllogistic conditional reasoning task was divided into three main components: (1) inductive rule learning; (2) induction of conditional language; and (3) deductive interpretation. When trained on all components, fifth and seventh graders became very competent in dealing…

An information-processing model was tested for a laboratory visualization task that represents one adaptation of a standardized spatial ability test. The pattern of results suggests that individual differences are a function of differences in the accuracy and/or quality of the mental representation, not just speed of processing. (Author/BW)

There are a variety of situations in which low-stakes achievement tests--which are defined as those having few or no consequences for examinee performance--are used in applied measurement. A problem inherent in such testing is that we often cannot assume that all examinees give their best effort to their test, which suggests that the test scores…

Major purpose of the study was to investigate the differences in visual fixations and required reading time when common-words questions were placed either before or after paragraphs. (Author)

The effect of parafoveal noise information on a Hirakana target-recognition task was investigated in good and poor readers from first and second grades. A differential effect of parafoveal noise produced a longer or shorter variation in reaction time depending on kind of surrounding material. Filtering mechanism efficiency differences are…

Reaction time and movement time were negatively and moderately-to-strongly correlated with Ravens matrices performance and with reading comprehension and performance on the California Test of Basic Skills for 20 ninth-grade girls. Weaker relationships were found for mathematics and English grades, although the direction was consistently negative.…

In two six-month longitudinal studies of intellectually advanced preschool children, letter naming time and background digit span were moderately good predictors of concurrent reading achievement, while no other standard cognitive indices, including mental age, were associated with reading achievement. Both memory span and retrieval were related…

Three experiments report additional evidence that it is a mistake to account for all interletter effects solely in terms of sensory variables. These experiments attest to the importance of structural variables such as retina location, array size, and ordinal position. (Author/PN)

Individual differences in context effects both in a word-level task and in a sentence-level task were found to be related to individual differences in reading continuous text. These results are presented within the framework of a verification model, and the implications for two-process theory are discussed. (Author/PN)

Measurements derived from reaction time, movement time, and an index of neural adaptability derived from averaged evoked potentials are significantly related to each other as well as to g factor scores extracted from a battery of 15 psychometric tests in a sample of 54 severely retarded adults. (Author/RD)

The effects of orthographic regularity and visual familiarity on internal coding and processing of visual stimuli were investigated in four experiments using college student subjects. Consistent effects of orthography on the activation of all codes were found. Familiarity influenced semantic more than phonetic codes. Implications for reading…

In the first of two experiments, 20 retarded young adults were compared on a simple discrimination task with 10 nonretarded students of the same CA. Patterns of reaction time were interpreted as indicating differences between the groups in response strategy, with retarded persons responding on the basis of little stimulus evidence. (Author/CL)

Different movement difficulties were presented and Fitts' Law was confirmed, with a linear relationship between movement time and information load. Measures of capacity placed ESN boys at least five years behind age-matched normal boys. Their performance was also lower, yet their strategies on the serial task followed similar patterns. (Author/SJL)