Hyperlexia is a syndrome characterized by a child's precocious ability to read. It was initially identified by Norman E. Silberberg and Margaret C. Silberberg (1967), who defined it as the precocious ability to read words without prior training in learning to read, typically before the age of five. They indicated that children with hyperlexia have a significantly higher word-decoding ability than their reading comprehension levels. Children with hyperlexia also present with an intense fascination for written material at a very early age.
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language.
Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text. In natural language, the readability of text depends on its content and its presentation. Researchers have used various factors to measure readability, such as:
A garden-path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down [or up] the garden path", meaning to be deceived, tricked, or seduced. In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), Fowler describes such sentences as unwittingly laying a "false scent".
Speed reading is any of many techniques claiming to improve one's ability to read quickly. Speed-reading methods include chunking and minimizing subvocalization. The many available speed-reading training programs may utilize books, videos, software, and seminars. There is little scientific evidence regarding speed reading, and as a result its value seems uncertain. Cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene says that claims of reading up to 1,000 words per minute "must be viewed with skepticism".
Reading for special needs has become an area of interest as the understanding of reading has improved. Teaching children with special needs how to read was not historically pursued due to perspectives of a Reading Readiness model. This model assumes that a reader must learn to read in a hierarchical manner such that one skill must be mastered before learning the next skill. This approach often led to teaching sub-skills of reading in a decontextualized manner. This style of teaching made it difficult for children to master these early skills, and as a result, did not advance to more advanced literacy instruction and often continued to receive age-inappropriate instruction.
Reading comprehension is the ability to process text, understand its meaning, and to integrate with what the reader already knows. Fundamental skills required in efficient reading comprehension are knowing meaning of words, ability to understand meaning of a word from discourse context, ability to follow organization of passage and to identify antecedents and references in it, ability to draw inferences from a passage about its contents, ability to identify the main thought of a passage, ability to answer questions answered in a passage, ability to recognize the literary devices or propositional structures used in a passage and determine its tone, to understand the situational mood conveyed for assertions, questioning, commanding, refraining etc. and finally ability to determine writer's purpose, intent and point of view, and draw inferences about the writer (discourse-semantics).
Accelerated Reader (AR) is a website used to assist students with reading skills.
High frequency sight words are commonly used words that young children are encouraged to memorize as a whole by sight, so that they can automatically recognize these words in print without having to use any strategies to decode. Sight words were introduced after whole language fell out of favor with the education establishment.
Susan Brady is an American psychologist and literacy expert who is a professor of school psychology at the University of Rhode Island. For many years, she led the Haskins Literacy Initiative at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut which promotes the "science of teaching reading." She has been a leading researcher in the area of reading acquisition for over thirty years and has been involved with efforts to improve state and national policy on the teaching of reading including speaking before a U.S. Senate committee.
Sentence processing takes place whenever a reader or listener processes a language utterance, either in isolation or in the context of a conversation or a text. Many studies of the human language comprehension process have focused on reading of single utterances (sentences) without context. Extensive research has shown that language comprehension is affected by context preceding a given utterance as well as many other factors.
Reciprocal teaching is an instructional activity that takes the form of a dialogue between teachers and students regarding segments of text for the purpose of constructing the meaning of text. Reciprocal teaching is a reading technique which is thought to promote students' reading comprehension. A reciprocal approach provides students with four specific reading strategies that are actively and consciously used to support comprehension: Questioning, Clarifying, Summarizing, and Predicting. Palincsar (1986) believes the purpose of reciprocal teaching is to facilitate a group effort between teacher and students as well as among students in the task of bringing meaning to the text.
Reciprocal teaching is best represented as a dialogue between teachers and students in which participants take turns assuming the role of teacher. -Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar
Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch.
Extensive Reading (ER) is the process of reading longer easier texts for an extended period of time without a breakdown of comprehension, feeling overwhelmed, or the need to take breaks. It stands in contrast to intensive or academic reading, which is focused on a close reading of dense shorter texts, typically not read for pleasure. Though used as a teaching strategy to promote second-language development, ER also applies to free voluntary reading and recreational reading both in and out of the classroom. ER is based on the assumption that we learn to read by reading.
Brian Lewis Butterworth FBA is emeritus professor of cognitive neuropsychology in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, England. His research has ranged from speech errors and pauses, short-term memory deficits, reading and the dyslexias both in alphabetic scripts and Chinese, and mathematics and dyscalculia. He has also pioneered educational neuroscience, notably in the study of learners with special educational needs.
Word recognition, according to Literacy Information and Communication System (LINCS) is "the ability of a reader to recognize written words correctly and virtually effortlessly". It is sometimes referred to as "isolated word recognition" because it involves a reader's ability to recognize words individually from a list without needing similar words for contextual help. LINCS continues to say that "rapid and effortless word recognition is the main component of fluent reading" and explains that these skills can be improved by "practic[ing] with flashcards, lists, and word grids".
Linguistic prediction is a phenomenon in psycholinguistics occurring whenever information about a word or other linguistic unit is activated before that unit is actually encountered. Evidence from eyetracking, event-related potentials, and other experimental methods indicates that in addition to integrating each subsequent word into the context formed by previously encountered words, language users may, under certain conditions, try to predict upcoming words. In particular, prediction seems to occur regularly when the context of a sentence greatly limits the possible words that have not yet been revealed. For instance, a person listening to a sentence like, "In the summer it is hot, and in the winter it is..." would be highly likely to predict the sentence completion "cold" in advance of actually hearing it. A form of prediction is also thought to occur in some types of lexical priming, a phenomenon whereby a word becomes easier to process if it is preceded by a related word. Linguistic prediction is an active area of research in psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience.
Charles Perfetti is the director of, and Senior Scientist for, the Learning and Research Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. His research is centered on the cognitive science of language and reading processes, including but not limited to lower- and higher-level lexical and syntactic processes and the nature of reading proficiency. He conducts cognitive behavioral studies involving ERP, fMRI and MEG imaging techniques. His goal is to develop a richer understanding of how language is processed in the brain.
The word frequency effect is a psychological phenomenon where recognition times are faster for words seen more frequently than for words seen less frequently. Word frequency depends on individual awareness of the tested language. The phenomenon can be extended to different characters of the word in non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese.
The simple view of reading is a scientific theory that a student's ability to understand written words depends on how well they sound out (decode) the words and understand the meaning of those words. Specifically, their reading comprehension can be predicted by multiplying their skill in decoding the written words by their ability to understand the meaning of those words. It is expressed in this equation:
