Describes selected plans of teaching reading--individualized reading, basal reader, initial teaching alphabet, language experience and color coding--and suggests each plan's inherent philosophy. (MM)

Presents report of 1983 conference on trade books for young children co-sponsored by Drexel University and Free Library of Philadelphia. Keynote address by Ava Weiss, Art Director of Green Willow Books, is followed by summaries of workshops led by well-known authors, illustrators, and/or editors. A selected bibliography of books is included. (EJS)

Discusses some of the problems in creating bibliographic descriptions for materials published in languages which employ nonroman scripts, analyzes the impact of online catalog systems in overcoming some of these difficulties, and describes some of the computer hardware, particularly terminals, being developed to handle nonroman scripts. (JL)

A computer analysis of the most frequently occurring (approximately 18,000) words in the English language was conducted. All letter strings from two to seven letters in length (ngrams) were output. The information maybe useful for reading instruction. (Author/RD)

A model of context effects in perception is applied to perception of letters. Perception results from excitatory and inhibitory interactions of detectors for visual features, letters, and words. The model produces facilitation for letters in pronounceable pseudowords as well as words and accounts for rule-governed performance without any rules.…

Reviews work on three areas of visual information that are available to readers: information provided by the conventional arrangements of the print on the page, by the features of each letter, and by the shapes of entire words. (HOD)

Effects of target-noise similarity on the ability to discriminate between two target letters were investigated. Performance was low when the noise letter shared the same name as the target. Thus, interletter interference effects cannot be explained in terms of inhibition between visual features. A "cognitive masking" hypothesis is proposed.…

Presents a case report of a retarded person with elementary reading, writing and spelling skills being trained to use graduated physical and verbal prompts in order to teach another retarded patient. Over an eight-week period, the student mastered the alphabet and learned to spell and read 50 words. (Author/SJL)

Reber found that subjects given neutral instructions to memorize letter strings from a synthetic language learned more about the underlying grammar than those instructed to try discovering the rules for letter order. Two experiments explored the relationship between implicit and explicit processes in the acquisition of complex knowledge.…

The present experiments, in conjunction with prior findings that good and poor readers differ in letter search time by their ability to use spatial redundancy, suggest that processes involved in the component skill of letter identification cannot be considered trivial to the reading process. (Editor)

Without help or encouragement Sequoyah pursued the power of the white man's "talking leaf" and gave the world a marvelously logical and simple alphabet. (Editor)

Memory for sequences of briefly presented letters was examined to discover the effects of intraserial repetition and acoustic contrast on recall of a critical letter pair. (Editor)

A study examined the effects of overt phonologic impairment on the phonological awareness, verbal working memory, and letter knowledge of 29 children with phonologic impairment and 16 controls (ages 3-6). Children with phonologic impairment performed significantly worse on tasks of verbal working memory, phoneme segmentation, and letter…