bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Reading retardation or linguistic deficit? I: interpreting reading test performances of hearing‐impaired adolescents
Authors: Webster A. , Wood D.J. , Griffiths A.J. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTThe performances of 120 children – 60 hearing and 60 hearing‐impaired – on the Brimer Wide‐span Reading Test were compared. These children fell into three groups of 40 (20 hearing‐impaired, 20 hearing) and were matched for reading ages at 7:0‐7:10, 8:0‐8:10 and 9:0‐9:10 years respectively. Their reading test performances were analysed in detail to reveal marked differences both in frequency of errors and error types between the deaf and hearing children at all reading ages. The hearing‐impaired children attempted significantly more test items than the hearing children of matched reading age. They made more errors and significantly more of their errors were classified as‘non‐linguistic’in nature. The implications of these results both for the nature of reading processes in the hearing‐impaired and the value of tests in measuring their reading abilities are discussed.
Context Cues in Early Reading
Authors: Beardsley Gillian 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTAn investigation was carried out to examine any significant differences in the use of four types of context cues by good and poor readers in the early stages of their reading development. Sentences incorporating proactive and retroactive syntactic, and proactive and retroactive semantic cues were presented in the form of deletions at three levels of difficulty. Sixty‐four subjects, 32 of each sex, were drawn equally from the six to seven and seven to eight year age levels and subdivided into groups of good and poor readers. Results indicated that all groups other than the youngest poor readers found the proactive semantic cues the most useful and made miscues displaying semantic associations across cue types. Implications for an understanding of strategies employed in early reading and approaches for instruction are discussed.
Orthographic structures: grapheme patterns in child and adult texts
Authors: Brian Thompson G. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTDescriptive statistics of grapheme patterns to which child readers are initially exposed were determined, with the purpose of providing a data source for research on children's knowledge and use of orthographic structures in reading and spelling English. The frequency of occurrence of grapheme patterns in the texts of two series of children's initial reading books were analysed by a classification of bigram components relevant to commonly postulated orthographic structures such as ‘letter cluster’, ‘blend’ and ‘digraph’. Frequencies among both word tokens and word types were tabulated for consonant‐value and vowel‐value bigrams for different spatial positions within words. Initial graphemes of words were also analysed by membership of such bigrams. Comparisons were made with similar tabulations derived from the Solso and Juel (1980) tables for adult texts. Although there was appreciable agreement, there were some notable instances of grapheme patterns which occurred with relatively high frequency in children's initial reading, but relatively low frequency in adult texts.
Factors influencing anaphoric processing in ESL reading comprehension
Authors: Parish Charles , Perkins Kyle 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of some factors that influence English as Second Language (ESL) readers’ ability to resolve anaphoric expressions. Fifty full‐time ESL students randomly drawn from three different proficiency levels served as unpaid volunteers for the project. Data were elicited by means of multiple‐choice and cloze tests. The experimental design contains one between‐subjects factor (proficiency level) and three within‐subjects factors, all orthogonally manipulated (number of antecedents, case of pronominal anaphor, and propositional distance from antecedent). A four‐way mixed ANOVA for the multiple‐choice tests indicated significant effects for proficiency level, case of anaphor, and the interaction of case and number of antecedents. A similar four‐way ANOVA for the cloze tests indicated significant effects for proficiency level, number of antecedents, case of anaphor, distance from antecedent, and for the interactions of case and antecedents, antecedents and distance, and case and distance. Similarities in the findings from this study and other first and second language studies are noted. Latent trait measurement procedures were employed to produce a rank order of difficulty for the different item types examined in this study.
Ocular dominance, reading and spelling: a reassessment of a measure associated with specific reading difficulties
Authors: Newman S. P. , Karle H. , Wadsworth J. F. , Archer R. , Hockly R. , Rogers P. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTThe association of reading disability with perceptuomotor problems has had a chequered history. This study examines the relationship between a new test of ocular dominance and reading and spelling ability in a group of 323 schoolchildren. Similar rates for unfixed ocular dominance were found for poor readers as in comparable studies. The rates of unstable ocular dominance did not differ between those with reading and spelling difficulties and controls. These findings in a ‘blind’ study question the role of this test of eye dominance as a diagnosis of ‘dyslexia’.
Dark‐interval‐threshold, illumination level and children's reading performance
Authors: Riding R. J. , Pugh J. C. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTNine‐year‐old children were given a test of dark‐interval threshold (DIT), and two parallel forms of the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability, one at low and the other at high illumination. DIT was measured by determining the shortest interval which caused a white disc viewed in a tachistoscope to disappear when the experimenter switched briefly to a second (black) field for an interval which ranged from 20 ms to 300 ms. A reasonable range of individual differences in DIT was found. There was a significant interaction (p<0.05) between DIT and illumination level in their effect on reading accuracy. Children who had a short DIT read more accurately in high than in low illumination, and the performance was reversed for long DIT subjects.
The nature of reader ability differences in lexical access
Authors: Briggs Pamela , Underwood Geoffrey 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTCan good and poor readers be differentiated by their use of word‐naming and lexical access codes? Poor readers experience extreme difficulty in decoding nonsense words, indicating that they cannot use the spelling to sound rules which underlie the indirect phonological route to word pronunciation. However, recent evidence suggests that poor readers do use a phonological route for lexical access in word and picture naming tasks which rely upon the production of a phonological code. Is this also true of other tasks, which are not dependent upon phonological representation? Two such tasks are described in the present study: one involving picture‐word interference, and the other involving a lexical decision paradigm. Results showed that poor readers do use a phonological route to lexical access independent of task demand. A review of findings in this area to date shows several inconsistencies, and an attempt is made to resolve these by drawing on Stanovich's (1980) interactive‐compensatory model of reading.
The comprehension of first and second‐language prose
Authors: Lasisi M. J. , Falodun Sola , Onyehalu A. S. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTHow does national culture interact with second‐language reading comprehension? This study investigated the effect of cultural medium of presentation, language, and sequence of cultural/foreign and first‐language/second‐language presentation on the literal and interpretative comprehension of Form I (seventh grade) bilingual Nigerian students. Data were analysed using ANOVA. Previous studies concerning schema theories were upheld in that the present results for Experiment 1 revealed significantly superior scores for culturally related English language text when compared with scores for foreign‐based passages written in English. The data from Experiment 2 also revealed similar results when the subjects were presented with the same Experiment 1 foreign‐based passages written in English and with translations of these English passages to the mother tongue. In spite of sequencing, scores were higher for the first‐language passages. For both experiments, scores were higher at the literal level and sequencing was found to have little effect in enhancing comprehension of culturally unfamiliar material.
Reading strategies of good and poor readers in word and phrase presentation
Authors: Beveridge Michael , Edmundson Susan 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTThis paper reports two experiments which use a micro‐computer driven self‐paced reading task to examine the reading strategies of good and poor readers. Unlike previous work using this technique the children were able to regress to earlier parts of the texts by pressing the appropriate computer key. The main focus of the experiments is on the relationship between reading strategies, reading ability and the length of the textual units which are presented to the children. Reading ability is found to influence reading strategies differently according to whether text is presented in single words or in phrases. A similar result is found for the time taken to read the texts. The results are discussed in the light of current theories of text processing. However the main point of the paper is to illustrate the use of a potentially powerful diagnostic tool which will operate on computers currently available in schools.
Are numbers logographs?
Authors: Green David , Meara Paul , Court Stephen 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTResearchers generally assume that logographs such as numerals form a homogeneous set. This paper presents a study whose results challenge that assumption. Using a visual search task, it is shown that native Chinese speakers, who can read and speak English, process strings of Chinese numerals differently from the way they process strings of Western numerals. The different pattern of results found with these two sets of numerals also contrasts with the pattern typically found when native English speakers process Western numerals. An explanation of this result is proposed based on the notion that visual search functions can be the outcome of the combined effect of different basic search procedures.
Improving advanced reading comprehension in a foreign language: summaries vs. short‐answer questions
Authors: Bensoussan Marsha , Kreindler Isabelle 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTSummarizing appears to be an activity well suited to sensitizing advanced foreign language readers to the inner workings of a text and weaning them away from word‐to‐word decoding. Indeed, recent research has emphasized the importance of summarizing as an aid to reading comprehension (Cohen, 1987; Bernhardt, 1986; Brown et al., 1981). We were interested in using summary writing as a tool in promoting reading comprehension and hypothesized that students who gained practice in extracting the main points of a text would become more effective readers.The main purpose of the study was to determine whether the comprehension of students who were trained to summarize improved more than that of students who responded to short‐answer questions. The researchers, who teach EFL (English as a foreign language) at Haifa University, taught 6 classes totalling 179 students. Three classes summarized 10 academic texts of general interest, while the other three classes answered short‐answer questions on the same texts.At the same time we collected information on the students’ background in order to identify possible non‐linguistic factors that may affect reading comprehension.Since the reading comprehension of all the classes improved significantly, it was not possible to say that either summarizing or the answering of questions was a major cause of this improvement. However, results suggest that writing summaries helped students read more efficiently. Results of MANOVA pointed to the conjoint effects of three factors: task (summary vs. short‐answer questions), gender (male vs. female), and native language (Hebrew vs. Arabic).Perhaps the most interesting finding is that classroom discussion in which students negotiated the scoring key of both summaries and responses to short‐answer questions (after handing in assignments) proved to be extremely valuable. This negotiation motivated students to become intensely involved with the text and more critical of their own responses.
Auditory perceptual processing in reading disabled children
Authors: Shapiro Jon , Nix Gary W. , Foster Steven F. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTOne hundred and three children attending Learning Assistance Centres due to reading difficulties and one hundred and three matched, average readers were administered a battery of auditory perceptual processing tasks. The battery was composed of auditory analysis and synthesis, auditory sequential memory, auditory discrimination, and phonemic segmentation tasks. A principal components analysis yielded four factors. These were determined to be advanced phonological awareness, sequential memory, discrimination, and simple phonological awareness. Discriminant analyses, using the factor scores, indicated that three of the four factors were able to discriminate between the able and disabled readers. Most notable among these was advanced phonological awareness. Auditory discrimination could not discriminate between the groups. The results suggest that there may not be one underlying phonological ability implicated in successful reading acquisition. Furthermore, it is clear that two levels of phonological awareness exist and that screening and diagnostic instruments should address both in order to have predictive validity.
Inferences and integrations made by readers of script‐based texts 1
Authors: van Oostendorp Herre 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTThe purpose of the present study was to investigate the extent to which readers make inferences and integrations during reading. The research questions were: first, do subjects infer script‐arguments and second, do subjects search for earlier instantiations of script‐ or nonscript‐arguments in the episodic memory structure (integration)? In three experiments, subjects read stories with sentences mentioning concepts that were semantically highly related to the theme of a story or semantically less related (by using typical script‐arguments or nonscript‐arguments). In addition, reading style and reading‐instruction were varied. Slow readers and readers with a careful‐reading instruction appeared to infer script‐arguments and integrated arguments to a high degree. Fast readers and readers with a fluent‐reading instruction did not infer script‐information and showed few integrations. They seemed to constrain themselves to a context‐evaluation strategy.
Age‐related changes in reading attitudes of young children: a cross‐cultural study
Authors: Saracho Olivia N. , Dayton C. Mitchell 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTThe Preschool Reading Attitudes Scale (PRAS) was administered to 2201 young children, from three to five years of age, in early childhood programs from several regions of the United States. The scale is categorized into four areas related to children's reading environment. School Reading Activities, Non‐school Reading Activities, Library Reading Activities and General Reading Activities. A validation sample revealed highly significant differences at all age levels between students receiving positive and negative teacher ratings of reading attitudes. The basic design involved three factors, age, sex, and ethnicity, and an analysis of variance was applied to total scores and subscores. The results showed significant outcomes for age and ethnicity, in addition to an age X ethnicity interaction. The results suggest that there are significant attitudinal differences between three‐year‐olds as opposed to four‐ and five‐year‐olds as well as age dependent differences among the ethnic groups.
Alternate eye suppression and reading ability: little or no effect
Authors: Goodman Gay , Holland Merle L. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTThe relationship between visual disorders and reading disability has been a source of controversy. Although much has been written, few clear relationships have been established. This study examined a particular visual disorder, alternating the use of the eyes. It has been generally assumed in the professional literature that eye alternation has a negative impact on a child's ability to read and perform visual‐motor tasks. To date, however, this assumption is without scientific validation.The purpose of this study was to determine whether alternating the use of the eyes does in fact have a negative effect on reading ability and on timed visual‐motor tasks. Forty school‐aged children, aged six to 14, were selected from the patient population of four ophthalmologists. Twenty alternators, whose ocular conditions were verified by ophthalmologic examination, were obtained. The control group was obtained by matching children with normal eye exams to the alternators. All subjects were given the WISC‐R (Wechsler, 1974) and the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests, Form B (1973).Results of the study indicated that the reading achievement of eye alternators was no different than it was for visually normal children. Also, alternators are no more likely to have difficulty with the visual‐motor tasks. Although alternators may score poorly on vision screening tests, there is no indication that their visual problems will affect their school achievement.
Evaluating the use of prediction: an experimental study with junior high remedial readers in individualized and small group settings
Authors: Foley Christy L. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTFifty‐four junior high school remedial readers served as subjects in this research study designed to examine the use of prediction during the silent reading of short stories with surprise endings. Investigated were the effects of instructional setting and content familiarity upon overall reading comprehension, literal comprehension, inferential comprehension, and interest. Verbal predictions and supportive evidence generated by students in the two prediction treatment groups at the story midpoint and climax were also examined. Data analyses revealed that both inferential comprehension and interest were negatively influenced by the use of the prediction strategy and that students in both prediction treatment groups had difficulty predicting accurately and supporting predictions with a combination of textual and scriptal information. Interest preferences related to the familiarity variable were present.
Is tradition english spelng mor dificlt than jermn?
Authors: Upward Christopher 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTTh role of th english riting systm has been neglectd in presnt debates on methods of teachng litracy skils. Its importnce can be demnstrated by comparing spelng dificlty in difrnt languajs, tho a meanngful comparisn has hithrto not been esy to make. This paper reports on a study wich elimnates variabls by examnng mispelngs made by english speakrs riting in english and jermn. Th numbr of errs is computed to produce a ranje of mesurs of comparativ dificlty, concluding that english spelng is almost 7 times mor dificlt than jermn. Th errs ar classifyd and ream for them discusd. It is sujestd that th iregularity of english spelng seriusly handicaps english speakrs and shud be remedid. Finaly, th mispelngs ar related to th redundnt letrs removed in Cut Spelng, to sho how far such a tecniqe for simplifyng ritn english wud help obviate mispelngs.
The level of abstraction of textual materials: a new and an old measure compared
Authors: Newton Douglas P. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTThe level of abstraction of textual material is one factor affecting the difficulty it presents to the reader and so effective ways of assessing it are potentially useful for the teacher and researcher. A ‘new’ measure was compared with an old one and some similarity found in their assessment of science texts. The earlier measure may be the easier one for the non‐specialist to use. The results also suggested a rule of thumb which practising teachers might find useful.
The effect of instruction in question‐answer relationships and metacognition on social studies comprehension
Authors: Benito Yolande M. , Foley Christy L. , Lewis Craig D. , Prescott Perry 
Published: November 2005

RÉSUMÉL'effet de l'instruction dans les relations question‐réponse et dans la métacognition sur la compréhension en sciences socialesCette recherche avait pour but de comparer un enseignement de sciences sociales dans lequel on enseignait aux éléves les Relations Question‐Réponse (RQR) afin d'améliorer leur conscience métacognitive lors de la lecture d'un texte et à savoir répondre aux questions sur le texte de l'approche pédagogique traditionnelle des manuels. Dans cette étude, qui comportait une répétition de la mesure, les 29 sujets étaient des éléves de 4° et 5° année ayant le Chamorro comme langue maternelle et provenant d'une école du sud de Guam (Iles Mariannes en Océanie). Tous les participants avaient un niveau de lecture de 4° année. Les éléves de deux classes de lecture ont formé les groupes expérimental et contrôle pour cette recherche de 22 jours.On a construit un instrument de compréhension en sciences sociales pour l'utiliser dans cette recherche et on a effectuéégalement une mesure de lecture standardisée en tant que pré et post‐test. La premiére variable dépendante évaluait la capacité des Clèves de répondre aux questions correspondant au livre de sciences sociales en usage et était sensible à l'entraînement métacognitif (RQR) fourni au groupe expérimental. Le second instrument évaluait la compréhension générale de la lecture pour essayer de mettre en évidence un transfert de l'enseignement de la compréhension en sciences sociales A une amélioration globale de la lecture.A la suite de l'administration des deux mesures dépendantes, on a fourni aux éléves du groupe expérimental des occasions de formation par l'enseignant et des occasions de d'entraînement métacognitif mettant l'accent sur l'utilisation de la stratégie RQR dans le manuel de sciences sociales choisi dans la circonscription. Avec le groupe experimental on a suivi un modéle d'enseignement par apports progressifs. Le groupe contrôle a continué a suivre le programme prévu par le manuel.
High school students' use of diagrams during reading
Authors: Moore Phillip J. , Chan Lorna K.S. , Au Wing K. 
Published: November 2005

ABSTRACTThis study examines how high school students use diagrams and summaries during reading and the effects of such on comprehension. The roles of verbal and spatial ability are also examined. Seventy‐four Year 7 (13‐year‐old) students each read a text presented on a computer screen. The text was presented one sentence at a time and subjects could call up a diagram or content‐equivalent summary of the main ideas of the text at any time. Time to read the sentences and the adjunct aids was controlled by the subject and recorded by the computer. In addition, the computer kept a record of where in the text subjects made a text‐to‐aid move. After reading, the subjects completed a 10‐minute filler task and then produced free recalls of the text. The free recalls were examined for the inclusion of details and main ideas. Path analyses showed a significant direct effect of verbal ability on the recall of details and main ideas as well as a significant indirect effect through time on diagram. Spatial ability was not found to have any effect on recall, either directly or indirectly. Analyses of text‐to‐diagram moves showed more inspections in the first few sentences followed by an essentially random inspection pattern. Instructional implications are discussed.