This author, an academic achievement teacher for second and third grade reading and math at Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School in Park Ridge, Illinois, contends that since fluency is such a measurable skill, over-emphasizing decoding and de-emphasizing comprehension results in short-changing students. In this article, she shares several reading…

In this systematic review of research, the author analyzes studies of neural cortical activation, brain plasticity, and braille reading. The conclusions regarding the brain's plasticity and ability to reorganize are encouraging for individuals with degenerative eye conditions or late-onset blindness because they indicate that the brain can make…

In a first experiment, we recorded event-related-potentials (ERPs) to "the" followed by meaningful words (Story) versus "the" followed by nonsense syllables (Nonse). Left and right lateral anterior positivities (LAPs) were seen from the onset of "the"up to 200 ms in both conditions. Later than 200 ms following the onset of "the" the left and right…

This study of the reading of text found that despite their lower reading speed on a reading-comprehension task, the children with low vision comprehended texts at least as well as did the sighted children. Children with low vision need more time to read and comprehend a text, but they seem to use this time with enough efficiency to process the…

The development of reading depends on phonological awareness across all languages so far studied. Languages vary in the consistency with which phonology is represented in orthography. This results in developmental differences in the grain size of lexical representations and accompanying differences in developmental reading strategies and the…

Letters and words are better identified when there are fewer available choices. How do readers use choice-set restrictions? By analyzing new experimental data and previously reported data, the author shows that Bayes theorem-based models overestimate readers' use of choice-set restrictions. This result is discordant with choice-similarity models…

The aim of this article is to illustrate how the teaching of thinking can be incorporated into regular teaching, using the teaching of reading as an example. It provides a brief overview of current understandings of the processes of learning to read and learning to think and then considers how noticing, naming, comparing, categorizing, connecting,…

The purpose of the present study was to compare the brain regions and systems that subserve lexical and sublexical processes in reading. In order to do so, three types of tasks were used: (i) silent reading of very high frequency regular words (lexical task); (ii) silent reading of nonwords (sublexical task); and, (iii) silent reading of very low…

Experiment 1 examined the time course of orthographic learning among Grade 3 children. A single encounter with a novel orthographic string was sufficient to produce reliable recall of orthographic detail. Moreover, newly acquired orthographic information was retained 1 month later. These data support the logistic learning functions featured in…

The role of phonological coding for character identification was examined with the benefit of processing parafoveal characters in eye fixations while reading Chinese sentences. In Experiment 1, the orthogonal manipulation of phonological and orthographic similarity can separate two types of phonological benefits for homophonic previews, according…

Brain activation during reading of phonographic (Hangul) and ideographic (Hanja) words is compared using functional MRI by taking advantage of the bi-scriptal system of the Korean language. To examine the psycholinguistic difference, i.e., phonographic vs. ideographic, separately from other differences due to Hanja being a secondary script, we…

Teaching Shakespeare to undergraduates can be difficult under the best of circumstances. The densely figurative language can be very difficult to sift through for students unfamiliar with anything but naturalistic speech. When this is further compounded by the students' resistance to reading anything longer than several paragraphs, teachers find…

Recent debates on lexical ambiguity resolution have centered on the subordinate-bias effect, in which reading time is longer on a biased ambiguous word in a subordinate-biasing context than on a control word. The nature of the control word--namely, whether it matched the frequency of the ambiguous word's overall word form or its contextually…

The working memory (WM) processes that underlie young children's (ages 6-8 years) mathematical precociousness were examined. A battery of tests that assessed components of WM (phonological loop, visual-spatial sketchpad, and central executive), naming speed, random generation, and fluency was administered to mathematically precocious and…

In this article, we discuss two characteristics of the majority of current behaviour- and molecular-genetic studies of reading ability and disability, specifically, the ascertainment strategies and the populations from which samples are selected. In the context of this discussion, we present data that we collected on a sample of Swahili-speaking…