Journal of Literacy Research

Response latencies were obtained in word matching and sentence completion tasks from disabled readers, age-matched normal readers, and reading-level matched normal readers. The disabled group was significantly slower than the old normal group on both tasks (p < .001) and did not differ from the young normal group. None of the groups required more time for sentence completion than physical matching, indicating that semantic processing of these sentences was highly automatized. The disabled and younger groups were slower on physically confusable words than dissimilar words; whereas, the older were the same on both types of words, indicating that perceptual and decoding processes are learned by normal readers but are a primary source of deficiency in disabled readers.

The extent to which underlining as an adjunct study aid influenced recall was investigated. Subjects were 64 tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade students and 61 college sophomores assigned to one of 5 conditions. The 5 conditions varied on amount of underlining and difficulty of material underlined. For each condition, exposure time was held constant. No significant differences among groups were found. The data indicate that, with time held constant, underlining is of limited value and may only manipulate which parts of a passage may be learned at the expense of other parts.

The relationship between cross modal functioning and reading achievement was examined. A review of the literature supports the contention that sensory integration and cross modal functioning appears to be related to reading achievement. The degree of this relationship was found to be highly dependent upon the child's developmental level, sex, socio-economic background, and the task requirements. Inconsistencies in results were often a function of differences in methodology and instrumentation. The available hypotheses concerning intersensory functioning and their concomitant educational implications are discussed.

In spite of claims to the contrary, affective factors related to teaching and learning can be measured. Recent development of affective scales in reading attest to this, yet caution must be observed that as new-scales are developed, they are adequately validated so that the research emanating from their use can be regarded with a high degree of credibility. In that light, those who construct affective scales must consider more than content validity; they must also investigate construct validity. This includes evidence in four categories: reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and sensitivity to treatment. Specific references are made to investigations of the validity of the Vaughan Attitude Scale which measures teachers' attitudes toward teaching reading in content area classrooms.

This investigation focused on the role of meaning in the learning of sight vocabulary for beginning readers. Phase I reported the collection of associative data and reconstruction of a search of meaningfulness for 48 selected nouns. Phase II presented data regarding two sight vocabulary teaching-testing cycles with an intermediate interval inferred for “association verbal encoding” (a/v/e) training. Subjects were 46 first grade children. Results indicate that meaningfulness facilitated rate of acquisition and retention of sight vocabulary and that “process plus content” a/v/e training facilitated sight vocabulary retention when compared to no training in a/v/e.

This work is concerned with a study of the graphemic-phonemic associations formed during beginning reading responses and with the heuristic value of viewing the formation of such associations as a classical conditioning process. The study consists of two experiments designed as replication and extension of earlier work done by Samuels (1967). S's drawn from grades one and three were tested with a range of picture/no-picture-word association tasks.

Experiment I concludes that Samuels' 1967 study was not a test of attentional processes and was not a proper test of whether pictures act as distractors. However, within the visual modality, pictorial representations of extraneous objects may have distracting effects upon reading responses to specific words. Experiment II results suggest that in 1st and 3rd grades there are no significant differences in acquisition of reading responses to printed words between groups that have learned with pictures present and those that have learned in the absence of pictures. Concluding observations are made regarding limitations of the Samuels 1967 design.

Using 48 college texts, comparisons were made of Dale-Chall Readability Formula results based on samples taken from various page intervals. Results indicate that for the 48 textbooks examined, samples taken at 20, 30, 40, and 50-page intervals are as reliable as samples taken from 10 page intervals.

The present study examined the relationship of auditory-visual integration and reading performance in a sample of British 8 to 9 year olds. The effects of I.Q. and sex differences were examined as possible moderating variables. Significant correlations were obtained between auditory-visual integration and reading ability in the total sample. Although sex was not a significant contributor to the relationship the results suggest that I.Q. did make a significant contribution especially at the lower levels.

No studies have investigated whether the writing of certain transformations can predict comprehension of prose written in them. In studying this possibility, 90 subjects, 30 from each grade level, were asked to read three major prose forms, each written in three transformed versions, and to respond to each immediately on Cloze tests. Every subject also rewrote a simple sentence paragraph using his own sentence combining techniques. The Cloze test scores were then compared to sentence-lengthening criteria in a multiple regression analysis. Cloze tests did not satisfactorily predict sentence length. Yet there was strong evidence to suggest that Cloze tests are less valid measures of advanced reading comprehension and that the higher Cloze scores predicted lower sentence-lengthening criteria.

Two groups of college students learned the meanings of 15 unfamiliar words. One group (N=35) learned them through the pairing of word and definition; the second group (N=35) learned them through analysis of each word as it appeared in one-sentence contexts. Two posttests were given both groups. One posttest consisted of one-sentence contexts similar to those seen by the context group. The second test consisted of the definitions seen only during training by the definition group. On the context posttest the group that had seen only contexts did significantly better than the group that had seen the definitions (p < .01). On the definitions-only test there was no difference. The results indicate the conceptual meanings of the words were best acquired through an analysis of contexts.