Betty A Levy

McMaster University | McMaster · Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour

Three experiments examined the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 students. In Experiment 1, homophone and spelling control errors were embedded in a story context and participants performed a proofreading task as they read for meaning. For both good and poor readers, more homophone errors went undetected than spelling...

We investigated whether children who were learning to read simultaneously in English and French activate phonological representations from only the language in which they are reading or from both of their languages. Children in French Immersion programs in Grade 3 were asked to name aloud cognates, interlingual homographs, interlingual homophones,...

English language predictors of English and French reading development were investigated in a group of 140 children who were enrolled in French immersion programs. Children were first tested in kindergarten, and their reading achievement was tested yearly in both English and French from Grades 1 to 3, with word-level and passage-level measures that...

Although research has established that performance on a rapid automatized naming (RAN) task is related to reading, the nature of this relationship is unclear. Bowers (2001) proposed that processes underlying performance on the RAN task and orthographic knowledge make independent and additive contributions to reading performance. We examined the ben...

The experiment reported here explored the importance of engaging 4-year-old children’s interest in the print itself during storybook reading. We explored the effect of computer animation of the print in order to draw the child’s attention to each word as it was read. We also investigated the influence of illustrating that not all visual displays ar...

A great deal of research has examined predictors related to the development of reading fluency and reading comprehension. Whilst a number of studies support the relationship between the development of reading fluency and subsequent improvements in reading comprehension, many studies have shown faster and more accurate decoding does not automaticall...

Two experiments explored the levels of text representation that mediate text repetition effects, following the Raney (2003) model. The magnitude of the repetition benefit in Experiment 1 supported predictions of Raney's model, indicating that the ease of forming a situation model contributed to the magnitude of the reprocessing benefit. In addition...

An experiment is reported which investigated the use of semantic relatedness as a retrieval cue in the primary memory component in a free recall task. Six-word semantically related clusters were placed in the middle and end positions of free recall lists. Retention was measured immediately after the list presentation and after a filled retention in...

The ability to recognize letter patterns within words as a single unit is important for fluent reading. This skill is based on previously established memory representations of common letter patterns. The ability to form these memory representations may be impaired in some poor readers, particularly readers with naming speed deficits (NSD). This stu...

Successful reading instruction entails not only acquiring new words but also remembering them after training has finished and accessing their word-specific representations when they are encountered in new text. We report two studies demonstrating that acquisition, retention, and transfer of unfamiliar words were affected differentially by isolated...

Word reading fluency, as indexed by the fast and accurate identification of single words, predicts both general reading ability and reading comprehension. This study compared the effects of context training and isolated word training on subsequent measures of word reading fluency. Good and poor readers were given 12 repetitions of two sets of words...

This study explored the development of children's early understanding of visual and orthographic aspects of print and how this is related to early reading acquisition. A total of 474 children, ages 48 to 83 months, completed standardized measures of phonological awareness and early reading skills. They also completed experimental tasks that tapped...

While fluent reading is recognized as a primary goal of educational instruction, the methods that best promote the development of fluency remain unclear. Two experiments are reported that examined increases in reading fluency of a novel passage following two types of training. In the context training condition, children learned to read a set of tar...

We examined the relations among phonological awareness, music perception skills, and early reading skills in a population of 100 4- and 5-year-old children. Music skills were found to correlate significantly with both phonological awareness and reading development. Regression analyses indicated that music perception skills contributed unique varian...

Six experiments explored the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings when words were embedded in meaningful texts. Specifically, the studies examined whether participants detected the substitution of a homophone mate for a contextually appropriate homophone. The frequency of the incorrect homophone, the frequency of the correct homopho...

Six experiments explored the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings when words were embedded in meaningful texts. Specifically, the studies examined whether participants detected the substitution of a homophone mate for a contextually appropriate homophone. The frequency of the incorrect homophone, the frequency of the correct homopho...

Poor readers in Grade 2 (mean age 7 years 7 months) were categorized into fast and slow namer groups based on their performance on a Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) task. The fast and slow groups were then trained to read words using 3 different training regimes: one that taught onset/rime segmentation, one that taught phonemic segmentation, and one...

In two experiments, we examined transfer to the reading of a normal text from a prior reading of that intact text or from a prior reading of a scrambled word version of the passage. In Experiment 1, we studied good and poor readers in Grade 4; in Experiment 2, high- and low-ability undergraduate readers. Good readers at both ages showed rereading b...

We report two experiments that are consistent with two hypotheses about poor, nonfluent readers: (1) fluency gains in text reading skill transfer across contextual and linguistic boundaries and (2) these fluency gains enable higher-order comprehension operations to function in the processing of text. We conclude that unlike the fluent reader, the n...

In 2 studies, we compared the effectiveness of 4 different methods for acquiring initial reading vocabulary. Training emphasized similarity of word beginnings (onset plus vowel), similarity of word endings (rimes), phoneme segmentation and blending, or simple repetition of whole words. These 4 training regimes were compared with a control group giv...

This article reports two studies that examined the relationship between word identification speed and story reading fluency, as indicated by speed and accuracy as well as comprehension. Poor readers in grade 4 were trained to read a set of single words and were then asked to repeatedly read stories that contained the trained words or stories with w...

Seven experiments examined the influence of a memorial text representation on the later reading of a different text (across-text transfer). The texts were related by overlap in vocabulary only, in content only, in both vocabulary and content, or in neither vocabulary nor content. Results indicate that there was facilitation in reading the second te...

Four experiments examined the factors that influence across-text transfer for children. Transfer was indicated by increases in the reading speed and accuracy of a second text following reading of different first texts. The first texts were related to the second by overlap in words only, in content only, in words and content, or in neither words nor...

An error-detection paradigm was used to examine changes in how thoroughly the print and the message were analyzed as reading became more rapid across repeated readings. 24 good and 24 poor readers in Grades 3, 4, and 5 read stories 4 times in succession, crossing out misspelled words as they read. The misspellings changed on each reading encounter....

In three experiments we examined the effect of repetition practice on the acquisition, retention, and generalization of children's skill in rapidly naming visually presented words. Experiment 1 showed that naming times decrease rapidly with practice. Retention of this newly acquired skill in rapid naming was a function of the degree of learning dur...

Three experiments examined transfer of reading fluency across repeated readings of the same text and across related but different texts with a total of 102 college students. In Exp 1, it was found that a paraphrase that altered the syntactic structure of sentences but not the lexical identity of main concepts or the unfolding of the message was rep...

Six experiments examined readers' sensitivity to discrepancies introduced into familiar texts. Across 4 or 5 trials, Ss crossed out misspellings as they read. Reading times decreased across repeated readings, and even though misspellings differed on every reading, their detection remained constant or improved across readings. Thus, reading became f...

Reports an error in the original article by B. A. Levy et al (Canadian Journal of Psychology, 1991[Dec], Vol 45[4], 492–506). Corrections to tables 2 and 3 regarding mean reading times during original reading and rereading in Exps 1 and 2, respectively, are provided. (The following abstract of this article originally appeared in PA Vol 79:18597.) T...

Proposes that data-driven and conceptually driven processing become integrated to form an episodic representation that mediates transfer to later reading and memory tasks. These experiments explored conditions that produce visual script specificity for episodic transfer. Earlier work suggested that script sensitivity is reliably found only when the...

Two experiments examined whether the benefits of rereading are mediated by abstract word-level representations and are subject to the reader's focus of attention (T. H. Carr and J. S. Brown; see record 1990-27485-001). The effect of prior reading history was measured when 50 undergraduates reread a normal text and a scrambled word version of the t...

Recent claims that reprocessing benefits observed during rereading are mediated by abstract word-level representations (T. H. Carr et al; see record 1989-38877-001) were countered in 4 experiments with a total of 100 undergraduates. In these experiments, the amount of text context that was repeated between original and rereading tasks was varied....

Sometimes it's hard to get research published. Or so we lamented in the dining room of McMaster University's Faculty Club in January of 1987. We were talking about a type of research on individual differences in reading that we were both engaged in called "component skills analysis," "component process analysis," or "componential analysis." Such re...

In three experiments we examined word-and text-level transfer after different reading experiences. Experiment 1 showed that facilitation in the later perceptual identification of a word occurs when that word was originally read as part of a word set, but not when it was read as part of a meaningful text. Further, the word-to-word transfer effect ex...

Two experiments investigated developmental and individual differences in children's story comprehension and recall, as a function of story organization and presentation modality. In Experiment 1, children in Grades 3 to 6 read silently, read orally, or listened to well-organized and poorly organized stories. Both amount recalled and reliance on tex...

Reports an error in "Processing changes across reading encounters" by Betty A. Levy, Susan Newell, Judy Snyder and Kurt Timmins (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1986[Oct], Vol 12[4], 467-478). Figures 1 and 3 were mistakenly transposed. The figures are reproduced in the erratum, along with their correct captions...

Five experiments examined changes in the processing of a text across reading encounters. Experiment 1 showed that reading speed increased systematically across encounters, with no loss in the extensiveness of analyses of the printed text, as indicated by the ability to detect nonword errors embedded within that passage. Experiment 2 replicated this...

Five experiments examined changes in the processing of a text across reading encounters. Experiment 1 showed that reading speed increased systematically across encounters, with no loss in the extensiveness of analyses of the printed text, as indicated by the ability to detect nonword errors embedded within that passage. Experiment 2 replicated this...

Reviews the book, Literacy, language, and learning by D. R. Olson, N. Torrance, and A. Hildyard (1985). Literacy, Language, and Learning has something to offer all students of language. Its breadth is achieved through an interdisciplinary analysis of both written and spoken forms of language. The focus is on the differences between these two lang...

Levy (1983) demonstrated that more spelling errors were detected, within a limited time period, when familiar passages were proofread than when unfamiliar passages were proofread. In the present series, Experiment 1 eliminated a possible confound in the Levy (1983) studies and showed that errors were detected both faster and more accurately in fami...

Three experiments are reported that investigated the conceptual and perceptual processing involved in reading rotated, compared with normally oriented, typescript. These studies localized the effects of reading rotated text by measuring reading speed, detection of typographical errors, comprehension question answering, and time to reread a passage....

Recent emphasis on the interactive nature of processing during reading has focused attention on how higher level syntactic-semantic processes might constrain or alter the processing of letters and words during reading. The present studies addressed this question by examining the effect of prior knowledge about a passage on the subsequent ability to...

To evaluate Piaget's interpretation of long-term memory improvement, we showed 82 5- and 6-year-old children both a design unrelated to any hypothesized operation and a set of seriated lines. Immediately, after 1 week, and after 6 months, we asked the children to draw the 2 pictures from memory, to recognize them among arrays of alternatives, and t...

Even for Huey (1908), whose insights into reading still guide modern research, confusion surrounded the role played by speech processing during reading. While he claimed, “There can be little doubt that the main meaning comes to consciousness only with the beginning of the sentence utterance, and the reader does not feel he has the complete sense u...

The present research investigates the role of speech recoding, particularly its relationship to meaning analysis during reading. Experiment I documents a speech processing conflict during reading that is not evident in an analogous listening task. Experiment II presents evidence against a simple divided attention explanation of this conflict effect...

Considerable debate surrounds the question of whether phonemic or auditory processing is beneficial during reading. The present research tested the generality of two short-term memory phenomena, taken to indicate the presence of auditory processing, to the sentence memory case. Experiment I demonstrated that sentences were better remembered followi...

The present experiments explored ways in which information encoded along different dimensions might be co-ordinated to determine memory performance. First, can an acoustic similarity decrement be offset by additional semantic encoding? Experiment I offers evidence for this compensatory interaction of codes. Second, does trade-off occur such that mo...

Examined the suggestion that the absence of semantic-similarity effects in most short-term memory studies is due to the difficulty of semantically encoding unrelated words. The effect of semantic similarity on minimal paired-associate learning of semantically compatible (e.g., priest-religious) or incompatible (e.g., priest-delicious) noun-adjectiv...

Two studies are reported which investigated the role of overt articulatory activity in the processing of visually and auditorily presented material. The results of Experiment I showed that letters which were either heard or articulated could be recalled from short-term memory (STM) while visually presented items, neither articulated nor heard, were...

Although it is widely believed that verbal items are coded in primary memory (PM) in an acoustic or articulatory fashion, there is some evidence to indicate that PM may be a flexible system using the most salient characteristics of stored items. The possibility that semantic-associative attributes could facilitate free recall from PM was explored w...

traces the development of research . . . in using transfer measures as a way to explore memorial representations / investigated how prior reading of a message influenced the subsequent reading of that message / in other words, what remained in memory following a reading encounter that facilitated the rereading of that message / the procedure opens...

this chapter represents a report of results from the first phase of an ongoing research project / our aim in conducting the research was to better understand individual variation in the processing skills of children who are learning to read / the theoretical objective was to understand how these processing skills combine to yield fluent or nonfluen...

Three studies are reported in which Ss heard items under delayed or immediate auditory feedback (DAF, IAF). In Exp. I associatively similar lists were used in an attempt to limit the use of associative cues, thus forcing the S to rely on acoustic cues. The hypothesized decrement at recall under DAF as compared to IAF was not found. In Exp. II acous...