Word Recognition Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

23 Print Concepts-Grades K-1 25 Phonological Awareness-Grades K-1 30 Phonics and Word Recognition-Grades K-1-2 36 Fluency-Grades 1-2-3 SECTION THREE-GRADE 2 41 Phonics and Word Recognition-Grades 1-2-3 47 Fluency-Grades 1-2-3 SECTION FOUR-GRADE 3 53 Phonics and Word Recognition-Grades 2-3-4 58 Fluency-Grades 2-3-4 SECTION FIVE-GRADES 4-5 63 Phonics and Word Recognition-Grades 3-4-5 66 Fluency-Grades 3-4-5 REFERENCES 1. Demonstrate understanding of the organization and basic features of print.

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- Computer Science, Elementary Education, Word Recognition, Academic standards

This study compared the neuropsychological profiles of 46 children with Specific Language Impairment (SL1) and 16 children with SLI and Hyperlexia (SL1 + H). The results indicated that the essential feature of Hyperlexia is Specific Language Impairment and not reading disability. Thus, Hyperlexia would be best conceptualized as a subgroup of Developmental Language Disorder rather than as a subgroup of Developmental Dyslexia. Further, the SLI + H group exhibited significantly better developed visual/spatial memory which, along with average visual perceptual skills, appears to be the major contributing factor to their elevated word recognition and spelling ability. Finally it should be noted that both groups of children exhibited decreasing performance on tasks of immediate auditory/verbal memory as the language/semantic demands of the memory task increased. This finding appears to be the result of a limited capacity for immediate verbal processing and not the result of a deficit in verbal learning and recall.

- by Cynthia Riccio
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Spatial Memory, Medicine

The study explored the different influences of roots and suffixes in reading aloud morphemic pseudowords (e.g., vetr-ezza, “glass-ness”). Previous work on adults showed a facilitating effect of both roots and suffixes on naming times. In the present study, pseudoword stimuli including roots and suffixes in different combinations were administered to sixth-grade children with dyslexia (N=22) and skilled readers (N=44), matched

- by Traficante Daniela and +2
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Language

The role of morphology in reading aloud was examined measuring naming latencies to pseudowords and words composed of morphemes (roots and derivational suffixes) and corresponding simple pseudowords and words. Three groups of Italian children of different ages and reading abilities, including dyslexic children, as well as one group of adult readers participated in the study. All four groups read faster

- by Cristina Burani
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- Phonetics, Cognition, Reading, Morphology

Two studies were conducted to investigate the correlates of hyperlexia in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children with the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Study 1 involved 3 groups of school age children individually matched for word reading ability: 6 ASD hyperlexic children, 6 ASD non-hyperlexic children, and 6 typically developing children. Study 2 involved 2 ASD preschool hyperlexic boys, and a group of 21 typical children of similar word reading ability. In both studies, participants were administered several reading measures as well as measures of cognitive and linguistic abilities that have been associated with variations in typical and dyslexic reading, namely, vocabulary, phonological processes, and rapid naming. Results suggest that ASD hyperlexic reading differs from both typical and ASD non-hyperlexic reading. In particular, they suggest that hyperlexics learn to compute letter-sound relations implicitly, on the basis of statistical learning. Although the hyp...

- by Cláudia Cardoso-Martins
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- Education, Phonology, Portuguese, Autism
- by James McDonald
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Lexicology

The purpose of this experiment was to determine the relationship between psychometric functions for words presented in multitalker babble using a descending presentation level protocol and a random presentation level protocol. Forty veterans (mean = 63.5 years) with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing losses were enrolled. Seventy of the Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 words spoken by the VA female speaker were presented at seven signal-to-babble ratios from 24 to 0 dB (10 words/step). Although the random procedure required 69 sec longer to administer than the descending protocol, there was no significant difference between the results obtained with the two psychophysical methods. There was almost no relation between the perceived ability of the listeners to understand speech in background noise and their measured ability to understand speech in multitalker babble. Likewise, there was a tenuous relation between pure-tone thresholds and performance on the words in babb...

- by Christopher Burks
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- Psychometrics, Speech perception, Noise, Word Recognition

This article was downloaded by: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge]On: 6 June 2011Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 791963552]Publisher Psychology PressInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered... more

- by Sami Boudelaa
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Arabic, Cognition

Although students with or at risk for emotional disturbance present significant academic challenges, few researchers have studied the outcomes of interventions designed to improve the reading skills of this population. In this study we assessed the outcomes of a supplemental daily Direct Instruction reading curriculum, Reading Mastery I., and fluency building program, Great Leaps, on the reading skills of students at risk for emotional disturbance and reading deficits. Over a period of 7 months, 6 students received a supplementary reading intervention and 12 students (6 control at-risk and 6 norm-referencing students without disabilities) received their regular classroom instruction. Curriculum-based measures assessing early phonemic awareness and basic reading skills (i.e., letter sounds, blends, and high-frequency sight words) were collected biweekly to assess student performance. The results of this study revealed that at-risk students receiving the Direct Instruction curriculum ...

- by William Mickelson
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- Psychology, Word Recognition, Newspaper, Behavioral Disorders

A methodology and environment for building adaptive speech recognition systems is presented. The development environment is designed for isolated word recognition systems. A small speech recognition system is developed for a home automation system. It is demonstrated that one of the available connectionist models within this environment called ECoS, can accommodate new speakers and expand its output dimensions to recognise new words while maintaining its previously learned knowledge.

- by Akbar Ghobakhlou
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- Speech Recognition, Word Recognition, Environment and Development

Prosody has been widely used in many speech-related applications including speaker and word recognition, emotion and accent identification, topic and sentence segmentation, and text-to-speech applications. An important application we investigate is that of identifying question sentences in Arabic monologue lectures. Languages other than Arabic have received a lot of attention in this regard. We approach this problem by first segmenting the sentences from the continuous speech using intensity and duration features. Prosodic features are, then, extracted from each sentence. These features are used as input to decision trees to classify each sentence into either question or non question sentence. Our results suggest that questions are cued by more than one type of prosodic features in natural Arabic speech. We used C4.5 decision trees for classification and achieved 75.7% accuracy. Feature specific analysis further reveals that energy and fundamental frequency features are mainly responsible for discriminating between questions and non-question sentences.

- by Omair Khan
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- Speech Recognition, Decision Trees, Fundamental Frequency, Word Recognition

This paper addresses issues of frequency and transparency in word recognition and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in Developmentally Language Impaired (DLI) francophones. A simple visual lexical decision task probes responses of DLI and control participants when presented with verbs. DLI participants are sensitive to whole-word frequency and show little or no transparency effects. These results are interpreted as indicating that words are not organized according to ''morphological families'' in the DLI mental lexicon, but rather according to a principle of frequency. These facts support the hypothesis that words in the DLI mental lexicon lack lexical features and morphological structure.

- by Phaedra Royle and +1
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- Semantics, Cognition, Vocabulary, Language Impairment

In concatenative languages such as English, the morphemes of a word are linked linearly so that words formed from the same base morpheme also resemble each other along orthographic dimensions. In Hebrew, by contrast, the morphemes of a word can be but are not generally concatenated. Instead, a pattern of vowels is infixed between the consonants of the root morpheme.

- by Laurie Feldman
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Semantics, Visual perception

Recently, some new and promising methods have been proposed to reduce the number of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) computations in Isolated Word Recognition. For these methods to be properly applicable, the verification of the Triangle... more

- by H. Rulot
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- Word Recognition, Dynamic Time Warping

The International Reading Association attempts, through its publications, to provide a forum for a wide spectrum of opinions on reading. This policy permits divergent viewpoints without assuming the endorsement of the Association. Much of the material contained in this volume first appeared in The Reading Teacher, a copyrighted journal of the International Reading Association. Every attempt was made to contact authors of previously published work to inform them of this use of their material. The publisher welcomes correspondence from contributing authors concerning corrections or updated information that can he incorporated in subsequent editions of this publication.

- by Susan Homan
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- Computer Science, Elementary Education, Word Recognition, Vocabulary development

Dissociations in the recognition of specific classes of words have been documented in brain-injured populations. These include deficits in the recognition and production of morphologically complex words as well as impairments specific to particular syntactic classes such as verbs. However, functional imaging evidence for distinctions among the neural systems underlying these dissociations has been inconclusive. We explored the neural systems involved in processing different word classes in a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging study, contrasting four groups of words co-varying morphological complexity (simple, monomorphemic words vs complex derived or inflected words) and syntactic class (verbs vs nouns/adjectives). Subtraction of word from letter string processing showed activation in left frontal and temporal lobe regions consistent with prior studies of visual word processing. No differences were observed for morphologically complex and simple words, despite adequate power to detect stimulus specific effects. A region of posterior left middle temporal gyrus showed significantly increased activation for verbs. Post hoc analyses showed that this elevated activation could also be related to semantic properties of the stimulus items (verbs have stronger action associations than nouns, and action association is correlated with activation). Results suggest that semantic as well as syntactic factors should be considered when assessing the neural systems involved in single word comprehension.

- by Fanny Meunier
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- Semantics, Psycholinguistics, Speech perception, Magnetic Resonance Imaging

The goal of the present study was to delineate phonology's role in silent reading using event-related brain potential (ERP) techniques. Terminal endings of high cloze sentences were manipulated in four conditions in which the terminal word was: (1) the high cloze ending and thus orthographically, phonologically and semantically congruent (e.g., The gambler had a streak of bad luck.); (2) a pseudohomophone that was orthographically incongruent, but was phonologically congruent to the anticipated ending (e.g., The ship disappeared into the thick phog [fog].); (3) a word that was orthographically, phonologically and semantically incongruent to expectations (e.g., The dog chased the cat up the Queen [tree].); or (4) a nonword and consequently orthographically, phonologically and semantically incongruent to expectations (e.g., The gas station is about two miles down the bole [road].). A N270 was elicited by orthographically incongruent words and nonwords (conditions 2, 3 and 4), likely reflecting violations of orthographic form expectations, while the presence of the N400 to semantically incongruent words and nonwords (conditions 3 and 4) reflected violations of semantic expectations. The relative absence of the N400 response to pseudohomophones (condition 3) indicates that integrating word meaning with sentential context is influenced by the phonological representation of the presented letter string. The implication of these results for theories of word recognition is discussed. D

- by John F Connolly
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- Phonology, Semantics, Psycholinguistics, Speech perception
- by Irving Biederman
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- Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Higher Education
- by Juan Segui
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Semantics, Attention
- by Mariko Nakayama
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Bilingualism & the brain, Linguistics

It is commonly accepted that phonology is the exclusive domain of the left hemisphere. However, this pattern of lateralization, which posits a right visual field advantage, has been questioned by several studies. In fact, certain factors such as characteristics of the stimuli and subjectsÕ handedness can modulate the right visual field advantage. Thus, the goal of this study was to compare the hemispheric dynamics of right-handers and left-handers during a divided visual field presentation of words that varied in terms of their phonological transparency. For non-transparent words, the left hemisphere seems more competent in both handedness groups. With regard to transparent words, the right hemisphere of both groups also appears competent. Surprisingly, left-handers achieved optimal processing with a functionally isolated left hemisphere, whereas right-handers needed the participation of both hemispheres. The pattern of performance cannot be fully explained by either the callosal or the direct access model.

- by Laura Monetta
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Phonology, Cognition

have argued that the different domains comprising language (e.g., phonology, semantics, and grammar) may influence reading development in a differential manner and at different developmental periods. The purpose of this study was to examine proposed causal relationships among different linguistic subsystems and different measures of reading achievement in a group of children with reading disabilities. Methods: Participants were 279 students in 2nd to 3rd grade who met research criteria for reading disability. Of those students, 108 were girls and 171 were boys. In terms of heritage, 135 were African and 144 were Caucasian. Measures assessing pre-reading skills, word identification, reading comprehension, and general oral language skills were administered. Results: Structural equation modeling analyses indicated receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge was independently related to pre-reading skills. Additionally, expressive vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension skills were found to be independently related to word identification abilities. Conclusion: Results are consistent with previous research indicating that oral language skills are related to reading achievement (e.g., A. Olofsson & J. Niedersoe, 1999; H. S. Scarborough, 1990). Results from this study suggest that receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge influence pre-reading skills in differential ways. Further, results suggest that expressive vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension skills facilitate word identification skills.

- by maryanne wolf
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- Cognitive Science, Phonetics, Speech perception, Vocabulary

Phoneme recognition can mean two things, conscious phoneme-naming and p reconscious phone-categorization. Phoneme naming is based on a (learned) label i n the mental lexicon. Tasks requiring phoneme awareness will therefore exhibit all the features of r etrieving lexical it ems. Phone ca tegorization is a hypothetical pre-lexical and p reconscious process that forms the basis of both word recognition and phon eme naming. Evidence from the literature indicates that phone-categorization can be described within a pattern-matching framework with weak links between acoustic c ues and phon eme categories. This is illustrated with two experiments. The c urrent evidence favors a laxphoneme theory, in which all phonemic ca tegories s upported by the ac oustic e vidence and phonemic context are available to access the lexicon. However, the current evidence only supports segment-sized categories. It is inconclusive as to whether these categories are the same in number and content as the phonemes.

- by Rob J. J. H. Son
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- Computer Science, Word Recognition, Pattern Matching

Magnetic field recordings were made in order to describe brain processes during a word recognition experiment. We investigated 26 healthy young subjects (14 females) and focused on gender differences related to recognition performance and brain activity. From about 200 ms to 350 ms after word onset the event-related field (ERF) patterns differed significantly between women and men, although the mean recognition performances did not. Differences were due to different strengths of activation as well as due to the involvement of different neural structures as underlined with statistical analysis. We interpret that our physiological findings demonstrate that different mental strategies are used for correct word recognition in the brains of women and men as assessed with magnetoencephalography (MEG). Our data might be linked to previous findings about the hemispheric asymmetry in male subjects (left lateralized) compared to women in whom both hemispheres seem to be equally involved in wo...

- by Gerald Lindinger
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- Cognition, Statistical Analysis, Magnetoencephalography, Reading

A multi-modal system to control the movement of an Electric wheelchair, using small vocabulary word recognition system and a set of sensors to detect and avoid obstacles, is implemented. The methodology adopted is based on grouping a speech recognition microprocessor for isolated word from a dependent speaker and the set of sensors. The resulting design is used to control a wheelchair for a handicapped person based on the vocal command. The input of the system is a set of ten Arabic words used to control the movement of an automated guided vehicle (AGV) and information on the environment given by the sensors; the output is a corresponding command avoiding obstacles and planning collision-free paths. The system is developed in order to be installed on the wheelchair. Therefore it should be accurate, no bulky easy in operation and low power consumption.

- by mohamed FEZARI
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- Speech Recognition, Navigation, Word Recognition

This paper presents a system for a design and implementation of Optical Arabic Braille Recognition(OBR) with voice and text conversion. The implemented algorithm based on a comparison of Braille dot position extraction in each cell with the database generated for each Braille cell. Many digital image processing have been performed on the Braille scanned document like binary conversion, edge detection, holes filling and finally image filtering before dot extraction. The work in this paper also involved a unique decimal code generation for each Braille cell used as a base for word reconstruction with the corresponding voice and text conversion database. The implemented algorithm achieve expected result through letter and words recognition and transcription accuracy over 99% and average processing time around 32.6 sec per page. using matlab environment.

- by Ezza Ezza
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Language

This study examines how the cross-linguistic similarity of translation equivalents affects bilingual word recognition. Performing one of three tasks, Dutch-English bilinguals processed cognates with varying degrees of form overlap between their English and Dutch counterparts (e.g., lamp-lamp vs. flood-vloed vs. song-lied). In lexical decision, reaction times decreased going from translation equivalents without any cross-linguistic orthographic overlap to very similar but non-identical cognates. Identical cognates showed a large discontinuous processing advantage and were subject to facilitation from phonological similarity. In language decision, the effect of orthographic similarity reversed: A cognate inhibition effect arose, the size of which increased with orthographic similarity. Here identical cognates were markedly slower than other cognates. In progressive demasking, no orthographic similarity effect was found for non-identical cognates, but a semantic similarity effect arose. In addition, there was a facilitation effect for identical cognates of low English frequency. The task-dependent result patterns are interpreted in terms of four accounts of cognate representation and provide evidence in favor of a localist connectionist account.

- by Maya Sappelli
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Semantics, Cognition

Fast Start is a program designed to get primary grade children off to a successful start in learning to read through intensive and systematic parental involvement that is coordinated through the school and is based upon proven and effective methods of parent-child interaction around reading. The program is simple to learn, easy to implement, efficient in the amount of time invested by parents, and cost-effective for schools or other educational agencies wishing to implement it. In Fast Start, parents and children read a brief highly predictable and interesting text each day. The reading involves parents reading to children, neurological impress/paired reading, and moves toward children reading on their own. Repeated readings help build fluency, word recognition, and comprehension among children. After the text has been read, parents and children engage in word bank/word sort/sentence building activities using words from the current and previous texts. Preliminary studies of Fast Start have demonstrated that it can have positive effects on primary students' word recognition, fluency, and overall reading proficiency. (Contains 89 references.) (Author/RS) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.

- by Timothy Rasinski
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- Psychology, Primary Education, Word Recognition

in general, the inter-word dissimilarity measure supplied by Dynamic Time Warping algorithms can not be assumed to be a metric because it does not fully satisfy all the required properties (the triangle inequality in particular). In this paper, however, empirical evidence of loose satisfaction of these properties with real speech will be presented, allowing the assumption of a "loose metric space" structure in the set of parametric representations of words in a given vocabulary. Based on this structure, a search algorithm will be introduced which eliminates the need of computing the DTW-distance between the test word and many of the prototypes in the dictionary for Isolated Word Recognition. Experiments with vocabularies of different characteristics, have proved that the algorithm finds the nearest prototype by performing DTW computations with an average of only 30% of the words in the dictionary. This figure has been observed to decrease with increasing dictionary size, and also if the test word is close to the corresponding prototype ("well uttered" word).

- by Hector Segovia
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- Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Speech Communication, Word Recognition

Almost fifteen years have passed since the publication of the National Research Council's seminal report Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, which provided researchbased recommendations on what could be done to better position students in prekindergarten through third grade for success in grade four and above. This article by Nell Duke and Meghan Block first examines whether specific key recommendations from the report have been implemented in U.S. classrooms. They find that recommendations regarding increased access to kindergarten and greater attention to and improvement of students' word-reading skills have been widely adopted. Others have not. Vocabulary and comprehension, long neglected in the primary grades, still appear to be neglected. Contrary to the report's recommendations, attention to building conceptual and content knowledge in science and social studies has actually decreased in the past fifteen years. In other words, the easier-to-master skills are being attended to, but the broader domains of accomplishment that constitute preparation for comprehension and learning in the later grades-vocabulary knowledge, comprehension strategy use, and conceptual and content knowledge-are being neglected. Near stagnation in fourthgrade students' comprehension achievement is thus unsurprising.

- by Meghan Block
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- Social Work, Vocabulary, Reading, Best Practices

Word reading fluency, as indexed by the fast and accurate identification of single words, predicts both general reading ability and reading comprehension. This study compared the effects of context training and isolated word training on subsequent measures of word reading fluency. Good and poor readers were given 12 repetitions of two sets of words; 48 new words were learned in each condition. Words were presented in a story during context training and on a computer screen during isolated word training. Target words were read in isolation at test, randomly displayed within a series containing 72 untrained words. Results show that words trained in isolation are remembered longer and read faster when presented in isolation at test compared to words trained in context. Theoretical implications are discussed in relation to transfer appropriate processing.

- by Yossi Almayera
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- Education, Reading Comprehension, Word Recognition, Comparative Analysis

Over the past decade, fluent reading has come to be seen as a central component of skilled reading and a driving force in the literacy curriculum. However, much of this focus has centered on a relatively narrow definition of reading fluency, one that emphasizes automatic word recognition. This article attempts to expand this understanding by synthesizing several key aspects of research on reading fluency, including theoretical perspectives surrounding automaticity and prosody. It examines four major definitions of reading fluency and their relationship to accuracy, automaticity, and prosody. A proposed definition is presented. Finally, the implications of these definitions for current assessment and instruction are considered along with suggestions for reenvisioning fluency's role within the literacy curriculum.

- by Paula Schwanenflugel
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- Assessment, Psycholinguistics, Automaticity, Reading

- by Paula Schwanenflugel
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- Assessment, Psycholinguistics, Automaticity, Reading

A series of progressive demasking and lexical decision experiments investigated how the recognition of target words exclusively belonging to one language is affected by the existence of orthographic neighbors from the same or the other language of bilingual participants. Increasing the number of orthographic neighbors in Dutch systematically slowed response times to English target words in Dutch/English bilinguals, while an increase in target language neighbors consistently produced inhibitory effects for Dutch and facilitatory effects for English target words. Monolingual English speakers also showed facilitation due to English neighbors, but no effect of Dutch neighbors. The experiments provide evidence for parallel activation of words in an integrated Dutch/English lexicon. An implemented version of such a model making these assumptions, the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) model, is shown to account for the overall pattern of results.

- by Ton Dijkstra and +1
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Memory, Word Recognition
- by jacqueline leybaert
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Phonetics, Vocabulary

In this paper the authors present ongoing research on Sanskrit Textto-Speech (TTS) system called 'Samvachak' at Special Centre for Sanskrit Studies, JNU. No TTS for Sanskrit has been developed so far. After reviewing the related research work, the paper focuses on the development of different modules of TTS System and possible challenges. The research for the TTS can be divided into two categories -TTS independent linguistic study, TTS related Research and Development (R&D). The TTS development is based on the Festival Speech Synthesis Engine.

- by Diwakar Mishra
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- Speech Synthesis, Word Recognition, Research and Development, Text to Speech

Making and Writing Words is a variation of Making Words, a popular spelling and word study instructional activity. In Making and Writing Words, students are guided by their teacher in writing and sorting words using a limited set of letters. Teachers have found that the activity is engaging and appears to be helpful in developing students' proficiency in word recognition and spelling. Contents This article contains the following sections: Introduction and Background Making

- by Timothy Rasinski
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- Elementary Education, Word Recognition

This 3-year longitudinal study tested and extended model of the relationships between pre-school home literacy practices and children's literacy and language development. Parent-child reading (home literacy environment questionnaire plus children's Title Recognition Test) and parental teaching of letters, words and name writing were assessed 6 months prior to children's school entry. The 143 children (55% males; mean age 5.36 years, SD = 0.29) attended Gold Coast, Australia government Preschools. Parent-child reading and literacy teaching were only weakly correlated (r = .18), and were related to different outcomes consistent with the original model. Age, gender, memory, and non-verbal ability were controlled. Parental teaching was independently related to Preschool Woodcock Letter-Word Identification scores (R 2 change = 4.58%, p = .008). This relationship then mediated the relationships between parental teaching and Grade 1 and 2 letter-word identification, single-word reading and spelling rates, and phonological awareness (rhyme detection and phonological deletion). Parent-child reading was independently related to Grade 1 vocabulary (R 2 change = 5.6%, p =.005). Thus, both home practices are relevant, but to different aspects of literacy and language development.

- by Michelle Hood and +1
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Language Acquisition, Educational Psychology

Using a 30-item multiple choice type test, this investigation dwelt on the ability of college students to recognize terms and concepts used by librarians. A total of 447 respondents representing the fields of education, nutrition, food technology, tourism and hotel and restaurant management took part in this investigation. Data were gathered through robotfotos and an inventory of commonly used library

- by Kaori Fuchigami
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- Academic Libraries, Word Recognition, College Students, Analysis of Variance

The validity of the suggestion that dyslexic children make more letter reversal errors than other children was tested. Horizontal letter reversals of 8-to 11-year-old dyslexic children, nondyslexic speech-or language-impaired (SLI) children, and nonimpaired children in the context of individual letters, words, words spelled out letter-by-letter, and drawings incorporating letterlike shapes were examined. The results indicated that dyslexic children made significantly more errors than nondyslexic SLI and nonimpaired children in word production tasks but not word recognition tasks. When the letters were presented individually, the three groups did not differ in the number of reversals made. Results of the task that involved copying a drawing indicated that dyslexic children rarely reversed letters when they were embedded in drawings. The drawings of a person made by dyslexic children were no different in terms of structure and detail from drawings made by nonimpaired age-matched children. Letter reversals presented the greatest problem for dyslexic children in tasks in which the letters served a symbolic, specifically linguistic, function. (PAM)

This article focuses on use of Microsoft® PowerPoint™ paired with direct instruction (DI) to teach word recognition to young children at risk. DI has been a widely used teaching method for over 40 years, and is often used to teach emergent literacy skills. Recent DI research with preschoolers at risk has suggested the potential for using scripted, direct instruction-supported PowerPoint™ slides delivered with an LCD projection system to teach word recognition skills. Based on this research, specific instructional strategies for using this technology with children at risk is presented along with suggested scripts for classroom use.

- by Craig Blum
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- Technology, Early Childhood Education, Early Childhood, Direct Instruction

Word-search strategies were studied within a longitudinal design from Kindergarten 2 to Grade 1 (children aged 5-7). Results showed clear developmental trends from logographic, to assembled alphabetic, to alphabetic/orthographic addressed strategies, and differences in the speed of progression through the phases were linked to reading and spelling in Grade 2. However, results also showed a strong individual variability in strategy use at each observation period. Thus, stages of word recognition should be defined by the predominance of one type of strategy, and not by its exclusive use. The data also spoke in favor of the centrality of the alphabetical phase, because no evidence was found that some children could skip it. 0 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved 137 138 L. RIEBEN et al former the processes are automatic and irrepressible, whereas for the latter they are problem solving processes implying actively controlled procedures.

- by Christiane Moro
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- Psychology, Word Recognition, Learning and Instruction

Reading problems are one of the most common characteristics of stu-dents with learning disabilities (Bryan, Bay, Lopez-Reyna, & Donahue, 1991). Although estimates vary, prevalence studies of reading problems in-dicate that at least 6.2%... more

- by John W . Lloyd
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- Reading Comprehension, Word Recognition, Error Correction, Behavioral Education

The present study investigated the cognitive nature of second language (L2) lexical processing in sentence context. We examined bilinguals' L2 word recognition performance for language-ambiguous words [cognates (e.g., piano) and homographs (e.g., pan)] in two sentence context experiments with highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals living in a bilingual community (Experiment 1) and with intermediate proficiency Spanish-English bilinguals living in a monolingual community (Experiment 2). To determine the influence of sentence constraint on cross-language activation, the critical words and their matched controls were inserted in low-and high-constraint sentences. In low-constraint sentences significant cognate facilitation was observed, suggesting that both languages were active and influencing processing. In high-constraint sentences, the effects of cognate facilitation were eliminated. This interaction between cognate status and sentence constraint demonstrates that sentence context can restrict non-selectivity when there is sufficient semantic information to suppress the non-target language. The fact that this interaction was observed for both bilingual groups suggests that even less proficient bilinguals, who do not communicate daily in the L2, can use context to constrain crosslanguage lexical competition. Implications for current models of bilingual lexical access are discussed.

- by Judith Kroll
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Spanish, Cognition

Objective: We report three experiments evaluating the proposal that highlighting sec- tions of drug names using uppercase (“tall man”) lettering and/or color may reduce the confusability of similar drug names. Background: Medication errors commonly involve drug names that look or sound alike. One potential method of reducing these errors is to highlight sections of names on labels in order to emphasize the differences between similar products. Method: In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were timed as they decided whether similar name pairs were the same name or two different names. Experiment 3 was a recognition memory task. Results: Results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed that highlighting sections of words using tall man lettering can make similar names easier to distinguish if participants are aware that this is the purpose of the intervention. Results from Experiment 3 suggested that tall man lettering and/or color does not make names less confusable in memory but that tall man letters may increase attention. Conclusion: These findings offer some support for the use of tall man letters in order to reduce errors caused by confusion between drug products with look-alike names. Application: The use of tall man letters could be applied in a vari- ety of visual presentations of drug names – for example, by manufacturers on packag- ing, labeling, and computer software, and in pharmacies on shelf labels. Additionally, this paper demonstrates two meaningful behavioral measures that can be used during product design to objectively assess confusability of packaging and labeling.

- by Ruth Filik
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Pharmacy, Patient Safety

Recognition of conversational speech is one of the most challenging speech recognition tasks to-date. While recognition error rates of 10 or lower can now be reached on speech dictation tasks over vocabularies in excess of 60,000 words, recognition of conversational speech has persistently resisted most attempts at improvements by way of the proven techniques to date. Di culties arise from shorter words, telephone channel degradation, and highly dis uent and coarticulated speech. In this paper, we describe the application, adaptation, and performance evaluation of our JANUS speech recognition engine to the Switchboard conversational speech recognition task. Through a numberof algorithmic improvements, we h a ve been able to reduce error rates from more than 50 word error to 38, measured on the o cial 1996 NIST evaluation test set. Improvements include vocal tract length normalization, polyphonic modeling, label boosting, speaker adaptation with and without con dence measures, and speaking mode dependent pronunciation modeling.

- by Michael Finke
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- Speech Recognition, Performance Evaluation, Word Recognition, Boosting

Phonological characteristics of a voice, such as th-stopping (pronouncing them as " dem ") associated with African American English (AAE), provide indexical sociolinguistic information about the speaker. Word usage also signals this social dialect, i.e. usage of crib to mean house. The current study examines the effect of these sociolinguistic characteristics on word recall, as well as the interaction between the phonological and the lexical levels of variation. In a modified word recognition task, listeners displayed more accurate veridical word recall of AAE lexical items and voices. Furthermore, there was an interaction between phonological and lexical variation: listeners were even more accurate at recognizing AAE-specific lexical items heard in an AAE voice. This study adds to a growing body of work finding that sociolinguistic information influences word memory.

- by Zion Mengesha
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- Dialects of English, Memory, Word Recognition, Lexical Variation
- by Marie-josèphe Tainturier and +1
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Electrophysiology, Vocabulary