Originally published in 1992. This book brings together the work of a number of distinguished international researchers engaged in basic research on beginning reading. Individual chapters address various processes and problems in learning to read - including how acquisition gets underway, the contribution of story listening experiences, what is involved in learning to read words, and how readers represent information about written words in memory. In addition, the chapter contributors consider how phonological, onset-rime, and syntactic awareness contribute to reading acquisition, how learning to spell is involved, how reading ability can be explained as a combination of decoding skill plus listening comprehension skill, and what causes reading difficulties and how to study these causes.

Originally published in 1992. This book brings together the work of a number of distinguished international researchers engaged in basic research on beginning reading. Individual chapters address various processes and problems in learning to read - including how acquisition gets underway, the contribution of story listening experiences, what is involved in learning to read words, and how readers represent information about written words in memory. In addition, the chapter contributors consider how phonological, onset-rime, and syntactic awareness contribute to reading acquisition, how learning to spell is involved, how reading ability can be explained as a combination of decoding skill plus listening comprehension skill, and what causes reading difficulties and how to study these causes.

are the findings that Wade-Woolley and Siegel obtained when they studied children for whom English was a second language. Although the second language speakers performed more poorly than the native speakers on tests of syntactic knowledge, phoneme deletion, and pseudoword repetition, the second language speakers were not worse than the native speakers in spelling. These results suggest that, even if children have not fully mastered the sound system of their second language, they need not be disadvantaged in spelling it. The findings appear to pose a challenge to views of reading and spelling that place primary emphasis on phonology. The Muter and Snowling study, together with the Nunes, Bryant and Bindman study, broadens the focus by examining aspects of spelling beyond phonology. Muter and Snow ling, in their longitudinal study of British school children, examined the degree to which various linguistic skills measured between the ages of 4 and 6 predicted spelling ability at age 9. The results support the idea that phonological skill plays an important role in spelling development, and further suggest that awareness of phonemes is more strongly related to spelling ability than awareness of rimes. In addition, grammatical awareness appears to predict spelling skill. Children who are able to reflect on meaning relationships among words may be in a position to understand how this information is represented in English spelling."

are the findings that Wade-Woolley and Siegel obtained when they studied children for whom English was a second language. Although the second language speakers performed more poorly than the native speakers on tests of syntactic knowledge, phoneme deletion, and pseudoword repetition, the second language speakers were not worse than the native speakers in spelling. These results suggest that, even if children have not fully mastered the sound system of their second language, they need not be disadvantaged in spelling it. The findings appear to pose a challenge to views of reading and spelling that place primary emphasis on phonology. The Muter and Snowling study, together with the Nunes, Bryant and Bindman study, broadens the focus by examining aspects of spelling beyond phonology. Muter and Snow ling, in their longitudinal study of British school children, examined the degree to which various linguistic skills measured between the ages of 4 and 6 predicted spelling ability at age 9. The results support the idea that phonological skill plays an important role in spelling development, and further suggest that awareness of phonemes is more strongly related to spelling ability than awareness of rimes. In addition, grammatical awareness appears to predict spelling skill. Children who are able to reflect on meaning relationships among words may be in a position to understand how this information is represented in English spelling."

Writing is one of humankind's greatest inventions, and modern societies could not function if their citizens could not read and write. How do skilled readers pick up meaning from markings on a page so quickly, and how do children learn to do so? The chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Reading synthesize research on these topics from fields ranging from vision science to cognitive psychology and education, focusing on how studies using a cognitive approach can shed light on how the reading process works. To set the stage, the opening chapters present information about writing systems and methods of studying reading, including those that examine speeded responses to individual words as well as those that use eye movement technology to determine how sentences and short passages of text are processed. The following section discusses the identification of single words by skilled readers, as well as insights from studies of adults with reading disabilities due to brain damage. Another section considers how skilled readers read a text silently, addressing such issues as the role of sound in silent reading and how readers' eyes move through texts. Detailed quantitative models of the reading process are proposed throughout. The final sections deal with how children learn to read and spell, and how they should be taught to do so. These chapters review research with learners of different languages and those who speak different dialects of a language; discuss children who develop typically as well as those who exhibit specific disabilities in reading; and address questions about how reading should be taught with populations ranging from preschoolers to adolescents, and how research findings have influenced education. The Oxford Handbook of Reading will benefit researchers and graduate students in the fields of cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, education, and related fields (e.g., speech and language pathology) who are interested in reading, reading instruction, or reading disorders.

This groundbreaking study on the psycholinguistics of spelling presents the author's original empirical research on spelling and supplies the theoretical framework necessary to understand how children's ability to write is related to their ability to speak a language. The author explores areas in a field dominated by work traditionally concerned with the psychodynamics of reading skills and, in so doing, highlights the importance of learning to spell for both psycholinguists and educators, since as they begin to spell, children attempt to represent the phonological, or sound form, of words. The study of children's spelling can shed light on the nature of phonological systems and can illuminate the way sounds are organized into larger units, such as syllables and words. Research on children's spelling leads directly to an understanding of the way phonological knowledge is acquired and how phonological systems change with the development of reading and writing ability. In addition to this insight concerning cognitive processes, the findings presented here have implications for how spelling should be taught and why some writing systems are easier to master than others. The work will interest a wide range of cognitive and developmental psychologists, psycholinguists, and educational psychologists, as well as linguists and educators interested in psycholinguistics.