While a great deal of attention has been directed to the potential value of using symbol systems other than the traditional 26-letter alphabet in the early stages of reading instruction, little attention has been paid to the potential value of using rebuses. In a linguistic sense, rebuses are symbols which represent entire words or parts of words;…

The perception of proximal relationships (directly stated in a sentence) or remote relationships (requiring sentences to be combined) in reading materials was studied to see whether children have the same difficulties in detecting the relationships as do adults. The subjects were 22 children from grades 2, 4, and 5 who were given stories to read…

The purpose of this study was to determine the disruptive effect of unknown words on reading and to examine this effect in relationship to grammatical position and modification type. Forty second grade children from two different lower middle class, semirural schools were randomly assigned to the standardization group or the experimental group.…

This paper discusses the reading diary study--a method that involves frequent observation and detailed note-taking of the strategies employed by a child while learning to read--and the problems of data reduction, limitations of methods employed by researchers, and analysis of data. The sections include "Miscue Analysis," which can be…

The viability of visual imagery as a prose-learning process was evaluated in two experiments with elementary school children in this study. In experiment one, two concrete ten-sentence passages were constructed. The attributes of two subclasses were contrasted in each passage (two kinds of monkeys in one passage, and two kinds of cars in the…

This paper discusses beginning reading instruction in the light of Piaget's theory, which demands that we think more broadly about the term "where the child is" in terms of his level of thinking, not simply his reading level or reading skill level. Using Piaget's four major developmental stages as the basis, the task of instruction in…

An initial philosophical analysis of "reading" has yielded; (1) that there cannot be a general definition of reading; (2) that the "focal" senses of "to read" indicate that reading is a form of linguistic perception carried out through the exercise of general linguistic abilities, adapted to a visual input of inscriptions with inherent linguistic…

In an investigation similar to the early Secor (1900) and Pintner (1913) studies, a verbal distractor was used to demonstrate that comprehension of written materials, though reduced, was not completely disrupted when mature readers engaged in an irrelevant articulation exercise. Twelve undergraduate and graduate subjects participated in two…

The aim of this study was to determine whether a general or specific context facilitation mechanism should be incorporated into information-processing models of reading. General facilitation models claim that a context can facilitate recognition of any word that is related to it. Specific facilitation models claim that a context will facilitate…

The auditory reassembly ability of 160 children drawn from the total third- and fifth-grade populations of three public elementary schools was investigated as a function of grade level and reading ability. The stimuli were temporally segmented consonant-vowel-consonant monosyllables with interphonemic intervals of 100, 200, 300, and 400…

This handbook discusses various topics of interest to reading consultants for the elementary level: beginning reading, word recognition, phonics, vocabulary development, comprehension, reading skills in the content area, individualized approaches to instruction, creative reading, the disadvantaged child, audiovisual aids, reading speed, reading…

Results from 188 subjects indicate that most of the items on the test conform to a Rasch latent trait model, but tend to cluster into levels consistent with a hierarchical structure of skills. (AA)

Compares and contrasts three reading comprehension taxonomies and discusses possible uses. (MKM)

Reading comprehension is an active inferential process. Three experiments are described in which the possibility was examined that highly probable inferences are drawn, even when they are unnecessary for comprehension. (Author/RM)