Neuropsychological and Cognitive Processes in Reading explores reading and reading disabilities within the context of cognitive psychology and neuropsychology. Emphasis is on the roles of brain mechanisms in reading and reading disturbances. In the areas of perception and cognition, theoretical models of the reading process are used to highlight the various psychological processes involved in the act of skilled reading. Comprised of 12 chapters, this volume begins with an introduction to the fundamental processes of reading, giving particular attention to a psychological theory that builds on two concepts: that the basic processes of reading are few in number, and that they are separable from one another. A useful and testable information-processing model of reading that consists of three separable, fundamental processes - decoding, word meaning, and sentence comprehension - is described. Subsequent chapters deal with some of the external and internal factors involved in reading; a model of disorders of reading comprehension (the alexias); the neuropsychological test performance of brain-damaged and non-brain-damaged dyslexic children; and the problem of subtypes of learning disability. Eye movements and perceptual spans in reading are also discussed, along with reading comprehension and the problem of agrammatism. The final chapter analyzes the factors that influence recovery from alexia. This book will be of interest to neuropsychologists and those engaged in neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and educational psychology.

The Onset of Literacy addresses one of the main questions in the field of reading research - why the acquisition of skills in reading and writing appears to be so much more difficult than the earlier acquisition of speech communication. As well as posing a major theoretical puzzle, the question has important implications for both instructional practices and ways of dealing with dyslexic children.Research on the reading process has made important progress in recent years, thanks to conceptual and methodological advances in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and neuropsychology, which have made it possible to deal with complex issues that in the past seemed to defy rational analysis. The Onset of Literacy presents a selective sample of work by major contemporary specialists who focus on current information processing approaches to the reading process and their interface with research on the development of reading and related skills. An introduction by the editor summarizes and places the various contributions within current analyses of reading inspired by the information processing approach.The chapters and their authors are: The Ability to Manipulate Speech Sounds Depends on Knowing Alphabetic Writing, Charles Read, Zhang Yun-Fei, Nie Hong-Yin, and Ding BaoQing. Literacy Training and Speech Segmentation, Jos� Morais, Paul Bertelson, Luz Cary, and Jesus Alegria. Phonological Awareness: The Role of Reading Experience, Virginia A. Mann. Word Recognition in Early Reading: A Review of the Direct and Indirect Access Hypotheses, Roderick W. Barron. The Similarities Between Normal Readers and Developmental and Acquired Dyslexics, Peter Bryant and Lawrence Impey. Language Mechanisms and Reading Disorder: A Modular Approach, Donald Shankweiler and Stephen Crain.Paul Bertelson is Professor of Experimental Psychology and Director of the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the Universit� Libre de Bruxelles. The Onset of Literacy is in a series that is derived from special issues of Cognition: International Journal of Cognitive Science, edited by Jacques Mehler. A Bradford Book.

Neuropsychology of Language, Reading, and Spelling explores the many neural systems and subsystems that contribute to the production and comprehension of oral and written language. This book is organized into five parts encompassing 12 chapters that emerged from the 1980 International Conference on the Neuropsychology of Language, Reading, and Spelling, sponsored by the Program in Neurosciences and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. This conference highlights the neurological and behavioral interrelatedness of language, reading, and spelling. After briefly dealing with the cognitive and language development, as well as learning to read and to spell as instances of acquiring skill, this book goes on discussing the activity of the learner in the development skill, the influence of interacting forces in the developing nervous systems, and the role of peripheral mechanisms in the development of speech and language. A chapter examines the central integrative mechanisms, specifically the electrophysiological research with infants on the dependence of language perception on multidimensional, complexes processes, and not solely as a left- or right-hemisphere task. This chapter also provides evidence of discrete localization of language processes within the dominant hemisphere at both cortical and subcortical levels. The final four chapters are devoted to an analysis of developmental disorders from the varied perspectives of neurology, linguistics, neuropsychology, and education. This book will be of value to neuropsychologists and developmental biologists.

Originally published in 1984, the previous two decades had seen a rebirth of psychological interest in the process of reading. Attention had increasingly been directed to aspects of fluent reading, such as eye-movement control or contextual effects within the sentence, to a great extent progress had depended on refinement of the experimental analysis of factors that govern the processing of isolated words. This seemingly narrow concern with word recognition turned out to raise a rich collection of questions about the reader’s access to phonology and meaning. In this volume these questions are pursued across the range of orthographic systems which written languages exhibit.

Bringing together neurological assessments of reading and cognition, this provocative volume, originally published in 1985, presents eight major and sometimes controversial studies on the parts and patterns of the reading process. With comprehensive coverage ranging from psycholinguistics and education to neurophysiology, these studies highlight new directions in the field at the time. The contributors support an interactive rather than dichotomous model of brain function, and stress individual differences in assessing reading and cognitive skills.

In recent years cognitive psychology has made a substantial contribution to our understanding of the reading process. This book aims to provide a review of the key areas within reading which have benefited from such an approach. The book begins with basic aspects of reading, covering the cultural and biological context of reading, word recognition processes and reading in relation to the following: working memory, syntactic analysis, the comprehension of text, the cerebral hemispheres, and eye movements. More applied aspects of reading follow: the development of reading in children, the development of phonemic awareness, reading retardation and its causes, and the alexias. Contributions include essays from some of the best-known authors in this field.

Learning to read may be the most complex cognitive operation that children are expected to master, and the latest research in cognitive development has offered important insights into how children succeed or fail at this task. The Cognitive Development of Reading and Reading Comprehensionis a multidisciplinary, evidence-based resource for teachers and researchers that examines reading comprehension from a cognitive development perspective, including the principal theories and methods used in the discipline. The book combines research into basic cognitive processes--genetics, perception, memory, executive functioning, and language--with an investigation of the effects that context and environment have on literacy outcomes, making clear how factors such as health, family life, community, policy, and ecology can influence children's cognitive development.