Word reading processes in children and adult literacy students.
Item
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Title
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Word reading processes in children and adult literacy students.
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Identifier
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AAI9605599
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identifier
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9605599
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Creator
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Greenberg, Daphne.
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Contributor
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Advisers: Linnea Ehri | Dolores Perin
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Date
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1995
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Education, Educational Psychology | Education, Special | Education, Reading | Education, Adult and Continuing
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Abstract
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Very little is known about similarities and differences between adults and children who appear to have similar reading levels. This study investigated factors which predict isolated word recognition, sight word reading, and nonword decoding ability in adult literacy students and children. Seventy-two adults and 72 children whose word recognition abilities ranged between the third and fifth grade levels served as the subjects. Tasks measuring sight word reading, nonword decoding, phonological, orthographic, amalgamation, and receptive vocabulary knowledge were administered. To investigate whether adult literacy students and children performed similarly on the various reading measures, a series of analysis of variance tests were conducted. The results indicated that the children were stronger than the adult literacy students in nonword decoding, phonological knowledge, amalgamation ability, and spelling skills. The adults were stronger than the children in their sight word reading and receptive vocabulary. The two groups were similar in their orthographic knowledge involving letter positions and letter patterns.;Intercorrelation matrices of the reading measures indicated more significant correlations for the children than for the adult literacy students. Therefore, in addition to the adults' specific reading subskill weaknesses, their reading subskills were less integrated.;Regression analyses were conducted to analyze which reading process variables were predictive of word recognition, sight word reading, and nonword decoding scores, and whether subjects' status as child or adult interacted with the predictor variables. A second round of regression analyses was conducted separately on the adults' and children's scores. The central question was how much variance was accounted for by the important process variables. Results indicated that with the exception of the added importance of rhyme word reading (one of the amalgamation tasks) for the adult literacy students, the same process variables accounted for the bulk of the variance in word recognition, nonword decoding, and sight word reading for both groups. However, less overall variance was accounted for in the adult literacy sample, suggesting that there may be other important reading processes yet to be identified in this population.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
