English and Hebrew native speakers read texts mutilated by removing strips at the top or bottom of lines. Reading English texts was impaired more by mutilating the top, but the reverse was found for Hebrew texts, due to the different ways information is distributed along the vertical axis of Roman and Hebrew letters. (Author/GT)

Media education specialist John Culkin talks with editor John Drexel about learning to read in the television age--and discusses a new alphabet, UNIFON, that may help solve the literacy crisis. (Editor)

Two studies examined young children's ability to name the first letter of spoken words, finding that although children were good at telling that "beech" and "beaver" began with "b," some stated that "wife" began with "y" and that "seem" began with "c." These errors reflect the letter names at the beginnings of the spoken words. (MDM)

The Korean alphabetic script ("Hangul") depicts alphabetic characters in syllable blocks. The present experiments investigate whether, as a consequence of this printing convention, the syllable has a special processing status in naming printed Korean stimuli, independent of lexical and subsyllabic sources of information. In the first experiment it…

The Pre-Kindergarten Inventory of Demonstrated Skills (Pre-KIDS) is designed to be used before the school year begins so that teachers and staff can obtain information about incoming kindergarten students. This information is intended to give teachers insight about what skills a student may or may not have before entering their classrooms. This…

The ability to recognize letter patterns within words as a single unit is important for fluent reading. This skill is based on previously established memory representations of common letter patterns. The ability to form these memory representations may be impaired in some poor readers, particularly readers with naming speed deficits (NSD). This…

Purpose: This study examined the independent and combined effects of two sources of linguistic knowledge (alphabet cues and semantic predictability) on the intelligibility of speakers with dysarthria. The study also examined the extent to which each source of knowledge accounted for variability in intelligibility gains. Method: Eight speakers with…

Foreign language lyric diction is a compulsory subject in all undergraduate vocal performance degrees in universities. However, the effectiveness of its teaching depends on the capacity of students to absorb the material, for which many are largely unprepared, due to their lack of previous language study. Further, native speakers of North American…

"American Languages: Indians, Ethnology, and the Empire for Liberty" is a study of knowledge and power, as it relates to Indian affairs, in the early republic. It details the interactions, exchanges, and networks through which linguistic and racial ideas were produced and it examines the effect of those ideas on Indian administration. First…

Educators need accurate assessments of preschool cognitive growth to guide curriculum design, evaluation, and timely modification of their instructional programs. But available tests do not provide content breadth or growth sensitivity over brief intervals. This article details evidence for a multiform, multiscale test criterion-referenced to…

This study had two main aims: (a) to develop checklists adapted for the French culture and the age of the children whose level of print exposure (PE) was to be assessed and (b) to analyse the impact of print exposure on various literacy skills. The checklists consisted of Titles, Magazines, and Authors (targets and foils). The children's responses…

Phonological awareness (PA) is the ability to analyze spoken language into its component sounds and to manipulate these smaller units. Literature review related to PA shows that a variety of factor groups play a role in PA in Mandarin such as linguistic experience (spoken language, alphabetic literacy, and second language learning), item type,…

This modified alphabet booklet belongs to a series of bilingual instructional materials in Hupa and English. The booklet begins with a Hupa Unifon alphabet chart giving the symbols used to reproduce the most simple version of the sounds in the Hupa language. Nearly 200 basic vocabulary words and phrases are given. A Hupa consonant is followed by…

This report is part of a continuing series providing information on the status and progress of studies dealing with the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications of research. The report covers the period from 1 January 1978 through 31 March 1978, and includes extended reports on the following topics:…

This paper seeks to define the relationship between speech and writing as two separate media within language, and suggests the use of the term translation to describe moving from one medium to another. Such a view acknowledges the independence of speech and writing, the possibility of translation in either direction, the possible untranslatability…