Components of phonemic processing and the beginning reader

This study primarily investigated various aspects of phonemic processing and memory in relation to reading in 74 5- and 6-year-old British children. A principal components analysis revealed a major connection between reading and aspects of phonemic processing for both age groups. For the 5-year-olds the processing of the initial phoneme was important for reading, whereas for the 6-year-olds processing of initial and final phonemes appeared to be equally related on this factor. A second factor for both groups was intelligence, which was related to reading only for the 6-year-olds; but this intelligence factor was more associated with phonemic processing for the 5-year-olds. An analysis involving clustering individual readers with similar patterns across the experimental variables showed some consistent profiles for disabled readers across the two age groups. These profiles suggested potential areas for remediation according to subgroup membership.     

The relative contributions of rods and cones in sensory memory under photopic and scotopic conditions

Brief presentations of letter arrays were probed by bar markers within or outside the fovea after various time delays. Figural information presented to the foveal region was retained better under a photopic condition than information in the parafoveal region, but under a scotopic condition parafoveal information demonstrated superior retention. However, decay rates over time of all functions were similar, demonstrating that figural information in the rods and cones decays at similar rates.     

A further evaluation of the limitation of wholistic visualization

In a previous study on the limitation of wholistic visualization, Beech (1976) found that when using a between subjects design, the limitation was an inverted-U function as presentation rate was varied. In the present study a within subject design was employed and it was found that as before, the limitation in visualization increased across the 0.5 to 3.0 sec/object presentation rates, but in contrast to Beech (1976), the limitation remained at an asymptote of 6.6 objects at the slower rates. This result excludes the hypothesis of image decay which was proposed previously. In the second experiment, the speed of visualizing each successively described object was monitored up to the point of the limitation. This showed that subjects took progressively longer to visualize as the array size increased. Furthermore, faster latencies for the first objects were related to subjects visualizing more objects both at the level of individual subjects and in terms of mean performance. Finally it was found that subjects who visualized more objects also remembered more objects on a recall test suggesting that visualization may aid recall.