Describes research results showing that letter-name knowledge does not aid the beginning reader in pronouncing words composed of the same letters. Suggests that letter-sound knowledge does have a beneficial effect. Bibliography. (RW)

Reports on a study that examined the preferences of kindergarten children for upper or lower case letters. Concludes that preference for letters may result from the development of an aesthetic sense. (FL)

Letter encoding is typically viewed as an automatic process that is both obligatory and interference free. In these experiments, either familiar or non-familiar primes produced significant amounts of interference even when subjects were trying to ignore the visual input. Early perceptual components of encoding are both obligatory and resource…

Briefly defines nine distinct methods of teaching reading and summarizes how teachers use reading materials. (AEA)

Two experiments using varying duration exposures related reading skill in adults to initial encoding of location information. Results suggest that the role of perception in reading has been underestimated because emphasis has been on item perception, not perception of spatial location. (Author/CP)

Comparing the effectiveness of four methods for training young children (4-4.5 years) in the skills of visual discrimination necessary to letter knowledge acquisition, this study indicates that training in oral description of critical cues of letters contributes to superior achievement in learning to match letters. (JC)

A method for motivating programing techniques in a computer science class which uses alphametics, mathematical puzzles where words or phrases represent numerals or arithmetic operations, is given. (MK)

Traces the history of the alphabet; cites recent developments in the field of neurophysiology that tend to support the hypothesis that the alphabet produced a situation favorable for the development of logic, rational thought, and science. Also comments on the reemergence of the oral tradition. (GT)

The response times of 32 process schizophrenics and 16 nonhospitalized controls were compared on three visual search tasks. Results suggest that process schizophrenics are not abnormally slow when extracting information from visual displays, and they appear to perform similar operations and strategies to those of normals when doing so. (Editor/RK)

Argues that an important type of child knowledge about letters is knowledge of the phonological structure of the letters' names in English. Concludes that learning the alphabet forms the basis for generalizations about the structure of letter names. (22 references) (Author/CK)