bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Levels of Language Competence and Reading Ability: an Exploratory Investigation
Authors: Whyte Jean 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTAssociations have been found between reading ability around the age of seven to eight years and communicative competence, indicating a stage corresponding to the Piagetian concrete operations stage. It was not known, however, whether children who lagged at that stage in learning to read and in acquiring communicative competence would eventually‘catch up’with their peers in both these areas. This paper reports an exploratory study of this issue with adults who had not learnt to read as children although they were of average intelligence, and had no obvious physical defect. The objectives were:(a) to investigate whether these adults would perform on the same level as normal reading peers on language tasks requiring communicative and analytic competence;(b) to investigate whether performance on these tasks would be related to level of vocabulary comprehension and intelligence.No significant differences were found between the groups in their performance on the tasks involving communicative competence. However, normal readers scored significantly higher in tasks requiring analytic competence or the ability to retrieve and transform verbal material. In addition, the pattern of correlations was different for the two groups, suggesting that they had undergone different courses of cognitive development. The results cannot tell us whether the ability to read, or lack of it, influenced the development of these functions or vice versa. It seems from this investigation, however, that not all functions of oral language develop to the same extent in readers and in non‐readers, and that this is not related solely to IQ.
Cultural Group, Reading Attainments and Dialect Interference
Authors: Pumfrey Peter D. , Lee Joyce 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACT(NB. In the interests of brevity, the British‐born children of parents of West Indian origin are referred to as the WI group and the children of parents of English origin are referred to as the E group.)It has been suggested that, partly because of dialect interferences, WI children experience greater difficulty than E group children in various aspects of reading.The present study compares the attainments of a sample of 20 WI and E boys and girls of equivalent intellectual ability attending a multi‐cultural inner‐city comprehensive school in a social priority area. Reading accuracy, reading comprehension and listening comprehension attainments of the children were tested by the individual administration of the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability, Forms A, B and C.In terms of both reading accuracy and comprehension, although the group mean scores were all below the norms for their chronological ages, there were no significant mean differences between the WI and E pupils or between boys and girls. Silent reading led to significantly lower scores than did reading aloud.
Oral reading errors: part of speech effects and their theoretical and practical implications
Authors: Potter F.N. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTData are presented which show striking differences between the characteristics of oral reading errors made to content and function words. Content word errors tend to be graphically similar but contextually unacceptable, whereas the reverse is true for errors made to function words — which are contextually acceptable but graphically dissimilar. This was true for two samples: for one child reading a total of 2,588 words, and for 12 children reading about 450 words each. There were however differences between the samples, and reasons for these are discussed. It is argued that some errors are better viewed not as errors in word recognition, but as post‐recognition errors — that is, errors which occur even when the word has been correctly identified. The errors in this study are also compared with those made by an adult with acquired deep dyslexia reading words in isolation, and similarities between the two sets of errors were observed. Finally it is concluded that teachers and researchers should (1) categorize errors into visual, semantic, derivational and function word errors, (2) should calculate the proportion of function word errors, and (3) bear in mind that oral reading errors may occur even when words are correctly recognised.
Automatic and conscious context effects in average and advanced readers
Authors: Simpson Greg B. , Lorsbach Thomas C. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTAverage and advanced readers from the fourth and sixth grades read visually presented words as rapidly as possible. Target words were preceded by a related prime word, an unrelated word, or a neutral warning stimulus. Related trials constituted 75% of the word prime trials for half of the subjects in each group, and only 25% for the other half. All groups were sensitive to this proportion manipulation, showing only faster naming times for related targets in the 25% condition. In the 75% condition, subjects showed inhibition for unrelated targets, as well as facilitation for related targets. The results indicate that the ability to use context deliberately to facilitate word recognition reaches asymptote for the average reader by the sixth grade at the latest, and perhaps by the fourth. This ability does not appear to be one that shows further improvements at higher levels of reading skill. Some possible reasons for the discrepancies between this research and that using incomplete sentence contexts are considered.
Oral reading errors of two young beginning readers
Authors: Campbell Robin 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTOral reading errors were collected from two young beginning readers (6 years old) as they read to their class teacher throughout a school year. The data were collected from the naturalistic setting of an infant classroom. The errors of substitution were analysed for graphophonic, syntactic and semantic similarity and examined to determine whether the observed response was a previously read word. The study demonstrated that the two boys frequently used a previously read word as a substitution although there was less reliance upon this source towards the end of the year. The graphophonic cue system was used throughout the year, with first letter similarity particularly in evidence. However, finer discriminations over time were also noted. The contextual constraints of syntax and semantics were in evidence throughout the year and the use of these cues had increased by the end of the year. The evidence from this in–depth case study was used to question previously postulated developmental phases of reading.
Young children's comprehension and recall of computer screen displayed text
Authors: Gambrel Linda B. , Bradley Virginia N. , McLaughlin Elaine M. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTIn this study 26 third grade and 36 fifth grade students, experienced in computer‐assisted instruction, were randomly assigned to one of two treatment conditions: computer screen displayed text or traditional printed page text. According to assigned treatment condition, subjects either read a story from the computer screen or printed page booklet. There were no statistically significant differences between the two treatment conditions on measures of reading comprehension. On the attitude survey subjects reported greater interest in the story when reading from the computer, however, they reported that the story was more difficult when reading from the computer screen. The results of the study suggest that extended reading of prose materials on computer screens is feasible for children as young as eight years of age.
Reciprocal teaching and reading comprehension: a review
Authors: Moore Phillip J. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTReading researchers recently have turned their attention to co‐operative forms of learning and teaching. One particular form of co‐operative teaching is reciprocal teaching which involves the reciprocal interaction of experts and novices in explicit, overt demonstrations of strategy use. Scaffolding, active meaningful involvement, feedback, and fading of the expert's leading the interactions are seen as critical elements of the technique. This paper outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the technique and reviews research examining the effects of reciprocal teaching of comprehension strategies (summarising, predicting, clarifying, questioning) on comprehension disabled subjects. In general the findings show powerful effects, effects that transfer and generalise. The potential of the technique for enhancing other reading skills is discussed.
Object‐naming deficits in developmental dyslexia
Authors: Snowling Maggie , van Wagtendonk Bente , Stafford Carolyn 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTThis paper reports two experiments which focus on the object naming deficits of dyslexic readers. In Experiment 1, dyslexic and normal readers were asked to name objects depicted by pictures or following their spoken definition. Ten‐year‐old dyslexics named fewer objects correctly than other children of a similar age, performing only as well as a younger group of 8‐year‐old normal readers. This was true irrespective of the modality through which they were tested. In terms of naming latency, however, they were similar to comparison groups. In Experiment 2, nine‐year‐old dyslexic and normal readers performed as well as each other in a receptive vocabulary test in which pictures had to be matched to spoken words. However, once again, on a picture naming test, the dyslexics did less well than controls. We argue that dyslexic children are subject to verbal naming difficulties which cannot be accounted for by generally low levels of vocabulary knowledge. Their problems are attributable not to difficulties in semantic representation but to difficulties with the lexical‐phonological representation of spoken words they know. We propose that, in turn, these difficulties are related to their memory and reading problems.
Interactions in the development of spelling, reading and phonological skills
Authors: Cataldo Suzanne , Ellis Nick 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTEarly interactive processes of development in reading, spelling and implicit and explicit phonological awareness were assessed in a group of children at four time‐points as they progressed through their first three years in school. Exploratory causal path analyses were used to investigate the contribution of each ability to the subsequent growth of skill in reading, spelling and phonological awareness. The resultant structural models demonstrate a role of spelling in the early stages of reading acquisition, as well as differential contributions of implicit and explicit phonological awareness to both reading and spelling. They also suggest a developmental cascade from implicit to explicit phonemic awareness in the normal acquisition of phonological knowledge and associated skills.In the early formulative stages of reading implicit phonemic awareness and reading act reciprocally to build skill in each other. But, as ability in word recognition improves, implicit phonemic awareness plays a diminished role in reading. This pattern of initial reciprocal influence and later dissociation is repeated in the relationship between implicit phoneme awareness and spelling. Explicit phonemic awareness is an important factor in the first stages of spelling development but only emerges later as a significant contributor to reading. The early influence of explicit phoneme awareness on spelling, in conjunction with the major contribution of spelling to beginning reading, indicates that experience in spelling promotes the use of a phonological strategy in reading. Within a developmental context, explicit phoneme awareness initially appears to grow out of an implicit appreciation of the overall sound properties of words. Thereafter, ability to identify and segment phonemes develops independently of implicit phonemic awareness and plays an increasingly important role in the further growth of reading and spelling.
Pseudohomophone effects in 8 and 11 year old good and poor readers
Authors: Johnston Rhona S. , Rugg Michael D. , Scott Tana 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTEight and 11 year old good and poor readers carried out a lexical decision task, in which the accuracy of responding to nonwords and pseudohomophonic nonwords was assessed. Nonwords such as‘loast', are meaningless but conform to the rules of English spelling. Pseudohomophones, such as‘poast', are a special category of nonword as they sound like real words. In this study, the two classes of nonwords were closely matched for visual similarity,‘poast’and‘loast', for example, differing only in the initial consonant. All the groups were more prone to misclassify pseudo‐homophones as words than nonwords. Poor readers of average and below average IQ, and their reading age controls, performed very similarly. It was concluded that the poor readers were equally as able to generate phonological information from nonwords as their reading age controls, and that there was no evidence to suggest that the poor readers suffered primarily from a phonological dysfunction. Both the average and below average intelligence poor readers showed a pattern of performance indicative of a delay or an arrestment in reading development, rather than a deficit in generating and utilising phonological information.
Reading comprehension: skill or skills?
Authors: Rost Detlef H. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTResearch on the complexity of reading comprehension is highly controversial. In spite of the evidence for a holistic reading comprehension of skilled readers, reading specialists and teachers argue that early reading comprehension is composed of different separate subskills. To investigate this, 38 German reading tests (covering many different aspects of reading comprehension), one spelling test and one speed‐of‐information‐processing test were administered to 220 German second graders (114 girls, 106 boys). The frequency distribution of the 780 correlation coefficients indicated a very homogeneous structure. Taking into account critical points in the design of dimension analytical studies, a principal component analysis (principal axis extraction) led to only one broad general reading comprehension component, accounting for 61% of the total variance (56% for girls, 65% for boys). Reading comprehension of early readers thus appears to be holistic, closely related to general intelligence and verbal problem solving.
The processing of cohesion in fiction and non‐fiction by good and poor readers
Authors: MacLean Margaret , Chapman L. John 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTHalliday and Hasan's (1976) concept of textual cohesion has generated considerable interest among reading educators. However, there has been very little research which has considered how cohesion operates during reading. This paper reports on a study which used a selective deletion procedure to investigate how good and poor readers (N = 44) from a secondary school in England were able to use cohesion while reading fiction and non‐fiction. A feature of the analysis of the results thus obtained is the validation of the concept of a reading development continuum (RDC). Results indicate that good readers were more successful in maintaining the global unity of text than were the poor readers. As well, both groups of readers found it easier to perceive cohesion in fiction than they did in non‐fiction. Implications of these findings for reading instruction at the elementary and secondary levels are discussed.
Phonemic Analysis: effects of word properties
Authors: Schreuder Robert , van Bon Wim H. J. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTThe relation between performance in phonemic segmentation and reading and writing ability is discussed. Not much is known about how segmentation is carried out and which word properties influence performance. Therefore, effects of word properties (length, CV structure, syllabic structure, meaning) were investigated in two experiments. Strong indications were obtained that an onset‐rime distinction is relevant for the process of segmentation. The meaning of a word appears to have no influence. The decentration hypothesis can therefore be abandoned as an explanation for segmentation difficulties.Effects of length and syllabic boundary can be explained by the (disruptive) effect of consonant clusters, which are not only difficult to segment themselves, but also adversely affect the processing of segments earlier in the word. This leads to the conclusion that a simple, strictly serial model for segmentation cannot be adequate. The results furthermore suggest that an articulatory rather than a phonological code is the object of segmentation.
Ideational prominence and reading comprehension of expository prose: a partial replication
Authors: Abramovici Shimon 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTIt has often been demonstrated that adults are more likely to remember important text elements than less important elements –“levels effect”. It is not clear whether the same effect exists in children because the evidence is inconsistent. Most of the existing studies with children can be criticised for failing to include adult subjects as well as children, thereby making it impossible to determine whether the observed differences between adults and children reflect genuine differences in processing or just the effects of strategies for coping with the specific texts selected for the children. The present study partly replicated a study that found no evidence for a levels effect in children (Baumann, 1981) with a group of adults. With one passage stronger evidence for a levels effect was found with the adults in our study than was found with children, whereas with the second passage no evidence for a levels effect was found in either study. It was argued that this finding suggested that there were differences between adults and children in the extent to which they engaged in the type of processing that resulted in levels effects, but also that texts differed in the degree to which they induced this type of processing, and that the latter factor had to be taken into account in developmental studies.
Redundancy and the cohesion doze
Authors: Bensoussan Marsha 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTReading involves simultaneous top‐down processing, where the reader applies prior knowledge to the text, and bottom‐up processing, where the reader derives meaning from macro‐level structures in the text. Text redundancy is central to both.This study investigated the usefulness of using grammatical cohesion to evaluate comprehension on the macro‐ or discourse‐level, as well as on the micro‐level. The Cohesion Cloze was used to determine the extent to which 65 native speakers of Hebrew made use of text redundancy or cohesion when reading an English text. According to the categorization of grammatical and lexical cohesion by Halliday and Hasan (1976), blanks were chosen to test students’ recognition of the repetition of a word or its pronoun, a synonym, superordinate, or generalization. Students were directed to fill in the blanks with words already found in the text. Items were analyzed in terms of discourse analysis as relations of cohesion and coherence in the text.Results indicated that there was a relation between anaphora and coherence that contributed to reading difficulty. Cohesive markers were helpful where blanks were multi‐determined and there was redundancy of coherence. Passages which focused on a single idea were found easier to fill in than passages containing ideas that were compared and contrasted. Thus shifts in argument. were found to be more difficult to comprehend than a continuous chain of thought.
Pre‐reading format and learner proficiency level in L2 reading comprehension
Authors: Tudor Ian 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTThe article describes two related experiments into the effect of pre‐reading on the text comprehension of a population of L2 learners at three proficiency levels. Four sets of pre‐reading materials were used, two in each experiment. All were geared to content‐schemata activation, but differed in terms of the type of stimulus provided. The materials used in experiment I (a text summary and a set of pre‐questions) involved the provision of a relatively elaborated set of interpretive cues; those used in experiment II (topic prediction and a vocabulary‐based task) were more open and allowed for a greater degree of learner‐based schemata activation. Two main lines of investigation were pursued: the first relates to the relative effectiveness of the different pre‐reading formats, and the second to the possibility of an interaction between pre‐reading format and L2 proficiency level. Results indicated the more constraining, schemata‐provision formats used in experiment I to be more effective as aids to text comprehension. No level‐treatment interaction was observed, though comprehension facilitation was observed only among the lower proficiency groups — the higher proficiency group deriving no benefit from any of the pre‐reading formats used.
Primary school children's interpretations of lexical ambiguity in mathematical descriptions
Authors: Durkin Kevin , Shire Beatrice 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTMany words are used in mathematical descriptions in ways which differ from their everyday meanings. This study investigates how children interpret lexical ambiguity in written descriptions of mathematical relationships. Primary grade children were asked to identify the synonyms of ambiguous words, such as leaves, high, tables, make, which were presented in sentences biased toward either their dominant or their mathematical senses. Performance was superior in the everyday contexts. Error analyses revealed that subjects were more likely to identify incorrectly the synonym of the dominant sense when the ambiguous word was used in its mathematical meaning than they were to identify the subordinate, mathematical sense when the ambiguous word was used in its dominant meaning. Performance was age related and errors were more likely in younger children. The implications of a bias to interpret ambiguous terms in their dominant sense when reading maths materials are discussed as a pervasive but often unrecognised factor in mathematical education.
Patterns in children's ability to recall explicit, implicit and metaphorical information
Authors: Kincade Kay M. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study was to examine the effects of grade level and recall task type on children's memory for explicit, implicit and metaphorical information following reading. Forty second and 40 fifth grade subjects balanced as to gender read four prose passages and were randomly assigned to cued and free recall conditions. A MANOVA produced significant main effects for grade level and task type on each of three dependent variables; EXPLICIT, IMPLICIT and METAPHOR recall measures. As predicted, fifth graders fared better than second graders and the cued condition exceeded free recall. Of greater significance was the finding that second graders were able to engage in metaphorical reasoning when the task was appropriately structured. The results suggest that providing externally generated, structured probes can greatly enhance children's reading recall at both grade levels and can enable children to demonstrate metaphorical comprehension prior to the age at which it spontaneously appears. In addition, significantly different patterns of recalled information were found within the two task conditions, patterns that remained stable across age groups.
The relationship between the phonological strategies employed In reading and spelling
Authors: Huxford Laura , Terrell Colin , Bradley Lynette 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTThis paper summarises a longitudinal study which examined the relationship between the abilities of young children to read and spell phonologically. Empirical evidence of Bryant and Bradley (1980) and Cataldo and Ellis (1988) to show that children acquire the ability to use a phonological strategy for spelling before the ability to use an equivalent strategy for reading is confirmed. Implications for the teaching of reading are discussed.