The Effect of Pictures and Contextual Conditions on Learning Responses to Printed Words

A Reading Support Program for Low-Income Preschool Non-Readers in Singapore

“…This limitation can be explained by Samuels' (1967) early work on the focal attention theory suggesting that, for non-readers of normal ability, when a new word to be learned is accompanied by other stimuli, such as a related picture, less efficient learning took place. The reason behind this effect is that part of the attention is directed away from the new word and towards the accompanying pictorial cue (Singer, Samuels, & Spiroff, 1973). Other studies (e.g., Fossett & Mirenda, 2006;Saunders & Solman, 1984;Singh & Solman, 1990) have confirmed Samuels' theory and found that when pictures accompanied the words, students took longer time to reach criterion and made more errors than when pictures were not used.…”

Can Pictures Distract Students from the Printed Word: A Rebuttal

“…It seems to me that Montare, et al might have exhibited similar caution before publishing their results. My picture word study has been replicated by Braun (1969), Harris (1967), and Singer, et al (1973). Furthermore, the findings showing that in a picture-word situation, the student selects the picture as the functional stimulus fits well within a theoretical framework.…”

“…The Hartly Study (1970) was unable to come to any conclusion about the relative effectiveness of pictures and words. In fact, there were a sufficient number of problems in that study that rather than write a criticism of it, Dr. Harry Singer and I decided to do a similar study (Singer, Samuels, and Spiroff, 1973) which would test rate of word learning under context and no-context conditions with pictures or no-pictures present. This study, I might add, found pictures to be detrimental to word acquisition.…”

Improving reading fluency and comprehension in adult ESL learners using bottom-up and top-down vocabulary training

“…Research began with Samuels in the 1960s and was replicated by other researchers in subsequent decades (e.g., Ehri & Wilce, 1980;Singer, Samuels, & Spiroff, 1974) but then fell from favour. It has re-emerged as the focus of reading investigations beginning with the work of Johnston (2000).…”