The purpose of this study was to examine the word recognition abilities of readers with learning disabilities (LD) at four levels: Grades 2, 5, 8, and 11. The study's premise was that previous findings in relation to the word recognition abilities of readers with LD have been confounded by the use of frustration level materials for these readers. Therefore, this study compared the word recognition errors of readers with LD when they were reading instructional level materials (between 3% and 9% word recognition errors) and frustrational level materials (greater then 9% word recognition errors). The word recognition errors considered by this study were basic miscues (substitutions, omissions, insertions, teacher-pronounced); substitution types; reversal errors; and linguistic acceptability (syntactic and semantic). Findings showed that in the categories of linguistic acceptability, the readers produced significantly fewer acceptable responses when reading frustration level materials than when reading instructional level materials. No such difference was found in any of the other miscue categories when the two difficulty levels were compared.
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