Successful reading is a complex, interactive process in which the reader's experience and information are as important to comprehension as the content of the printed page. This article describes several reading processes, discusses the problems involved for the beginning reader, and indicates some implications for reading instruction. Five…

Reading teachers vary in their teaching methods for reading instruction, usually emphasizing either the meaningful functions (meaning) or the technical features (coding) of written language. This paper reviews literature on the meaning/coding dichotomy and focuses on a "cognitive clarity theory" that stresses linguistic awareness and…

This book brings together papers presented at a conference on early experience and visual information processing in perceptual and reading disorders sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. The goal of the conference was to integrate basic knowledge of structure and mechanisms of eye and brain with their function and their behavioral roles…

This paper discusses the nature of language knowledge and the manner in which children come to acquire this knowledge. Among the topics discussed are language production and the ability to understand sentences never heard before, sentence formation, children's construction of rules, children's language creativity, language acquisition and age,…

This paper describes a methodological approach to the reading processes, involving the use of measures of speed of response or reaction time (RT) obtained from subjects while performing reading related tasks. Following a review of the literature on measures of RT, two experiments currently being done at the University of Minnesota are described…

This study questions the developmental nature of the ability to understand syntactic structures. An exploration is made of the possibility of learning more about reading comprehension and readability by examining responses made to sentences described by transformational grammarians as structurally ambiguous. A group of fifth grade students were…

This paper reports on a study concerned with rapid mental operations of the central processor as it performs tasks such as the comparison of rotated figures, mental arithmetic, sentence verification, and memory scanning. The central processor is the site of most of the symbol manipulation that takes place in the human information processing…

Since, by the time they enter school, children have developed a major portion of their spoken language system by being immersed in language, it seems probable that they could also apply these rules to the orthographic system if they were immersed in reading. Thus, learning to read by reading would allow the general formation of rules that could…

In this investigation, the differences in psycholinguistic processing of written and spoken language and the psycholinguistic deficiencies of poor readers were studied by giving meaningful, anomalous, and random word strings to 18 good readers and 18 poor readers who were reading at the fourth grade level. It was found that in both spoken and…

This paper presents the results of investigations into mature readers' focal point when viewing letters, words, and phrases. The focal points are accurately determined by using the after image created from a spot of light. The after image is then superimposed on the reading material. The results show that the focal point does not fall haphazardly…

Stella Center's belief in the basic importance of grammatical structure as a factor in reading comprehension substantiated the author's theory that the ability to comprehend syntactic structure is positively correlated with the ability to comprehend meaning. Original instruments devised to test this hypothesis included a test which utilized…

Miscue responses of 20 first-grade pupils to 20 stimulus words were compared and analyzed for four different reading tasks: (1) in isolation, (2) in 10 free-standing sentences, (3) embedded in a complete story, and (4) embedded in an illustrated story. Analysis using the Reading Miscue Inventory indicated a significant gain in correct responses to…

The role of visual imagery in the learning of letter-sound combinations was investigated using such mediating images as two scoops of ice cream for the letter "m." In a preliminary study, high-, medium-, and low-strength mediating images were determined for each letter-sound combination. The 216 kindergarten subjects in the main study were…

Word-deletion items to be used as measures of comprehension were constructed by deleting a content word from an ambiguous target sentence constrained by an accompanying context sentence. One hundred twenty, third-grade students and 120 sixth-grade students each completed all of the items as one of three degrees of contextual constraint. Analysis…

A new kind of reading-language processing system, which has been in use at the Patterson Road School (Orcutt, California) since December 1972, is described in this document. The program consists of two ungraded reading chains of twelve groups each (determined by reading comprehension) which meet for 45 minutes daily, read material above the…