No abstract

The aim of this study was to determine more precisely the nature of the relation of phonological awareness to learning to read. First-grade children were administered tests of verbal intelligence, phonemic segmentation ability, and reading achievement. Results indicated that the relation of nondigraph word segmentation to reading achievement is greater than that of digraph word segmentation to reading achievement and that this relation is nonlinear. Consistent with the claim of a causal connection between phonological awareness and reading acquisition, a contingency analysis of the data revealed that phonemic segmentation ability is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for learning to read. The data were also subjected to a path analysis, which indicated that phonological awareness affects reading comprehension indirectly through phonological recoding and that the development of phonological awareness is not greatly affected by method of instruction. Implications of these findings for educational practice are briefly indicated.

25Although previous studies have demonstrated that syntacticawareness is related to beginning reading achievement, the direction of causation remains a matter of dispute. Our study employed a reading level design in which good, younger readers were matched with poor, older readers on four measures of reading ability (real word recognition, pseudo-word naming, reading fluency, and reading comprehension) and verbal intelligence. It was found that the good, younger readers scored significantly better than the poor, older readers on two measures of syntacticawareness, one an oral doze task and the other an oral correction task. The findings suggest that the older, poor readers weredevelopmentally delayed in syntacticawareness and that this delay may have retarded reading development.The ability of young children to produce the missing words in visually or orally presented sentences is related to their reading comprehension performance (Bickley et al., 1970;Perfetti & Roth, 1981;Ryan & Ledger, 1984). However, the word recognition ability of good readers while processing sentences is less dependent on prior context than that of poor readers (Stanovich, 1982a). It appears that the superior decoding skills of the better readers makes reliance on contextual information largely unnecessary. Perfetti et al. (1979) found that skilled readers who displayed smaller context effects in a word recognition task were nevertheless better than less skilled readers at using context to predict words in written and oral doze tasks. The correlation between word recognition performance and number of correct predictions was 0·60. This raises the question, however, of why better predictive abilities are associated with greater reading proficiency.One possibility is that the poorer performance of less skilled readers on doze tasks is a consequence of their difficulty in learning to read. Having successfully learned to read, good readers receive greater exposure to written language. This in turn results in the development and practice of their verbal abilities, rendering them superior to less-skilled readers on tasks involving verbal materials. Another possibility, which is investigated in this study, is that the doze task constitutes a measure of syntactic awareness and that this ability is causally related to learning to read.By syntactic awareness we mean the child's ability to reflect upon and to manipulate aspects of the internal grammatical structure of sentences. It is one of several general types of metalinguistic ability, a developmentally distinct kind of linguistic functioning which emerges during middle childhood and which is thought to be related to the more general changes in information-processing capabilities that occur during this period (Hakes et al

To test Rogers' protection motivation theory and Fishbein's behavioral intention model, subjects observed one of four water conservation films which differed according to message severity (high/low) and efficacy of conserving (high/low). A questionnaire assessed the impact of the films on (1) the arguments (informational items) presented; (2) beliefs external to the films; (3) fear arousal; (4) Fishbein's mediating variables SN and Aact; (5) appraised severity and efficacy; and (6) behavioral intention to conserve water. High efficacy and low severity messages increased positive evaluative attitudes (Aact) toward conserving water. Although there was no effect for these manipulations on behavioral intention, the film groups, when compared with a control group which did not observe a fdm, showed significantly greater intentions to conserve water. These results are accounted for through an informational analysis of the beliefs affected by the films. This analysis provided evidence that feelings of citizen's duty to conserve water and concern about the water situation are closely related to behavioral intentions. This analysis did not support Fishbein's assertion of a dominant mediational role for SN and/or Aact in predicting behavioral intentions. The possible inclusion of a moral norm measure as a third component of Fishbein's model is discussed.

Evidence was reviewed that (a) supported the proposition that general emotional arousal facilitates aggression in the presence of aggressive cues and (b) substantiated the position that an arousal state of anger specifically increases the instigation to aggression. Furthermore, research was reviewed that was consistent with the view that additional general arousal increases or decreases the effect of anger on aggression depending on whether the arousal state is attributed to the source of the anger or to another source of general arousal. Controversy about the anger-aggression relation was discussed in terms of the failure to specify the function of the aggressive response. Research revealed that if the aggressive response is directed primarily toward injuring the target (but not toward some other goal), an angered person expresses aggression.