A Linguistic Analysis of First-Grade Reading Errors

ANALYZES ORAL READING errors observed in a first-grade classroom as approximations to the correct response in terms of letters, word structure, grammatical acceptability, and semantic appropriateness. A measure of graphic similarity showed that better readers excelled weaker readers in more closely approaching the correct response; both groups improved throughout the year. On the syntactic level, judgments of grammatical acceptability reinforced by part-of-speech analysis showed that the class made responses that in general conformed to the constraints of preceding grammatical context, indicating that both strong and weak readers brought their knowledge of linguistic structure to bear on the identification of words. Some evidence arose for an inverse relationship in the use of graphic information and grammatical context. Judgments of semantic appropriateness in the sentence indicated that a response that was syntactically acceptable was almost always semantically appropriate as well.