Developmental aspects of spelling-to-sound mapping for English monosyllabic words are investigated with a simple two-layer network model using a simple, general learning rule. The model is trained on both regularly and irregularly spelled words but extracts regular spelling to sound relationships, which it can apply to new words. Training-related…

Highlights the benefits of a multisensory, hands-on, learning center approach to teaching phonics. Presents specific aspects of the teaching method, accompanied by a parent component, which details steps parents can take to participate in their child's education and reinforce their children's classroom experience. (SD)

First and second grade public school teachers were trained through interactive video-conferencing to implement "Language Enrichment," an Orton-Gillingham-based literacy instruction. The effectiveness of the linguistically informed training was demonstrated by documenting the longitudinal third grade reading comprehension achievement of…

The purpose of this study was to determine the components of working memory (WM) that underlie less skilled readers' comprehension and word recognition difficulties. Performance of 3 less skilled reading subgroups--children with reading disabilities (RD) in both word recognition and comprehension; children with comprehension deficits only; and…

This article contains excerpts from the author's two seminal texts: "Literature as Exploration (New York: MLA, 1938) and "The Reader, the Text, the Poem" (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978). In "Literature as Exploration," the author first presented her transactional theory of reading as she explored the personal, social,…

The relative importance of internal and external letter features of words in children's developing reading was investigated to clarify further the nature of early featural analysis. In Experiment 1, 72 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds read aloud words displayed as wholes, external features only (central features missing, thereby preserving word shape…

Eila Burns undertook the enquiry that is the subject of this article while studying for her MEd degree at the University of Birmingham. She is now a lecturer in teacher education at Jyvaskyla University of Applied Sciences in Finland. The project she describes here aimed to assess the effectiveness of peer tutoring and the advantages of the…

The paper explores the manner in which written texts are selected and used in the adult English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) classroom. Taking a sociocultural view of the reading process and of the nature of text, it argues that ESOL students have potentially rich textual resources, which are typically not acknowledged in the classroom:…

A metalinguistic deficit in the awareness of phonological aspects of spoken language has long been assumed to be the single most important cause of reading failure among developmental dyslexics. Majority of this proposal's empirical support has come from examination of reading problems in irregular language like English and it's relation to the…

Three experiments assessed the contributions of age-of-acquisition (AoA) and frequency to visual word recognition. Three databases were created from electronic journals in chemistry, psychology and geology in order to identify technical words that are extremely frequent in each discipline but acquired late in life. In Experiment 1, psychologists…

These are findings of theoretical interest from: (i) follow-up of a case study of a precocious reader; and (ii) normally developing readers who served as comparison groups. The precocious reader was first reported when 2-3 years of age (Cognition 74 (2000) 177). From 3 to 7 years of age her precocious reading development continued, her word…

Semitic writing systems such as that used to write Arabic are unique among st alphabetic writing systems in that in Semitic systems short vowels are represented as diacritics on consonant letters, and not represented at Allin text intended for skilled readers. Arabic is unique here in that the letter used to represent a consonant differs in shape…

The vast majority of work on the processing characteristics of poor readers has been conducted with readers of English. In this article we report on results that outline the processing characteristics of poor readers of the Korean alphabetic-syllabic script, "Hangul." Three groups of readers (10 good readers, 10 poor readers and 9 poor readers…

Arabic native speaking children are born into a unique linguistic context called diglossia (Ferguson, "word", 14, 47?56, [1959]). In this context, children grow up speaking a Spoken Arabic Vernacular (SAV), which is an exclusively spoken language, but later learn to read another linguistically related form, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).…

Research on learning disabilities (LD) depends upon a conceptual framework that specifies what it should explain, what kinds of data are needed, and how these data are to be arranged in order to provide a meaningful explanation. An argument is made that LD are no different in this respect than any other form of human illness. In this article, a…