Concepts of Meaning and the Reading and Spelling Difficulty of Words

Bloomer, Richard H.

doi:10.1080/00220671.1961.10882707

Cited by 15 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Although word imagery is an important predictor of reading difficulty for patients with acquired dyslexia and children with a specific reading disability, it may also be just as important in normal adults and children. In fact, a study by Bloomer (1961), showing that word concreteness is related to reading difficulty, and a study by van der Veur (1975), showing that a word's imagery value is predictive of how easy it is to learn to read, indicate that such might be the case.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effect of word imagery on reading performance as a function of reader ability.

Jorm¹

1977

Journal of Educational Psychology

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In three experiments on the effects of word imagery, length, and frequency on reading difficulty, high-frequency words were found to be easier to read for both good and poor readers. High-imagery words were easier to read for poor readers only. Word length had little effect on reading difficulty for either good or poor readers. The differential effect of word imagery on reading difficulty for good and poor readers was interpreted in terms of the types of reading strategy used -phonics for good readers and whole word reading for poor readers. When children are forced to learn to read words by a whole word method, word imagery predicts ease of learning for both good and poor readers.Although there has been a considerable amount of research on the effects of such word attributes as concreteness, imagery, meaningfulness, and frequency on memory and tachistoscopic word perception, little work has been done on the effects of these variables on word decoding. However, some recent research has studied the effect of word attributes on the reading performance of patients with dyslexia acquired through brain damage (Marshall & Newcombe, 1973; Richardson, 1975a Richardson, , 1975b Shallice & Warrington, 1975). Many of these patients seem to have a specific impairment of the ability to use grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules. Research with these patients has shown that imagery, concreteness, frequency, and part of speech are related to reading difficulty, but word length seems to have little or no effect. Richardson (1975aRichardson ( , 1975b has shown that a word's imagery value is the best This research reported in this article was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Grants Committee. The author wishes to thank Don McNicol for his advice and encouragement throughout the research and Julie Preston for her help with the preliminary testing of subjects.Requests for reprints should be sent to A.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effect of word imagery on reading performance as a function of reader ability.

Jorm¹

1977

Journal of Educational Psychology

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“…Bloomer (1961) found that subjects selected synonyms for concrete words more accurately than for abstract words, and on that basis argued that concrete words tend to be more meaningful. O'Neill (1972) had subjects rate a list of nouns on definability (D), imagery (I), concreteness (C), and a few other subjective measures not important to this discussion.…”

Section: Concrete Versus Abstract Wordsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Improving Comprehension for Jury Instructions

Sales

Elwork

Alfini³

1977

The Criminal Justice System

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“…Another important lexical variable that needs to be controlled in the writing of jury instructions is the concreteness of words. Many psycholinguistic studies suggest that concrete words are remembered and comprehended better than abstract words (Begg & Robertson, 1973;Bloomer, 1961;Duker & Bastian, 1966;Lay & Paivio, 1969;Olver, 1965;O'Neill, 1972;Reynolds & Paivio, 1968;Skehan, 1970;Yuille & Paivio, 1969). The exact reason for this superiority is still unknown.…”

Section: Vocabularymentioning

confidence: 99%

Juridic decisions: In ignorance of the law or in light of it?

Elwork¹,

Sales²,

Alfini³

1977

Law and Human Behavior

120

134

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Pattern jury instructions have been criticized for being less than understandable to the average juror and thus for causing arbitrary juridic decisions. Two studies were conducted to establish whether these criticisms are justified and to find solutions to these problems. Both studies established the validity of the criticisms by demonstrating that the presentation of presently used Michigan negligence instructions is about as effective in helping jurors understand the laws as the presentation of no instructions at all. It was found that by rewriting these instructions in accordance with empirical knowledge of what elements affect perception, memory, and comprehension of language, their effectiveness was significantly improved. Furthermore, it was found that the presentation of instructions both at the beginning and at the end of a case would allow jurors a greater opportunity to focus their attention on relevant evidence and to remember it. The studies demonstrate the urgent need for jurisdictions around the country to improve the way jury instructions are written and delivered, Jf they expect jurors to reach verdicts in light of the law rather than in ignorance of it.

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Concepts of Meaning and the Reading and Spelling Difficulty of Words

Cited by 15 publications

References 3 publications

Effect of word imagery on reading performance as a function of reader ability.

Effect of word imagery on reading performance as a function of reader ability.

Improving Comprehension for Jury Instructions

Juridic decisions: In ignorance of the law or in light of it?

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