Brooks, P. R. (1977). The Influence of Pictures, Context and Difficulty on Beginning Reading. Thèse de doctorat, University of Florida, 104 pages.
Eighty-three children (39 females, 44 males) who had completed first grade participated as subjects in this study to determine the effects of picture, context and difficulty on reading. Superior and below average readers were grouped into picture, no picture and control conditions (level and picture were between subjects factors). The experimental groups received easy and difficult word lists and stories (trials and difficulty were within subjects factors) while the control group received only the word lists. All groups received aid on a missed word during the second presentation of the stories (or word lists in the case of the control group). Total error frequencies, comprehension scores, and story category types of error frequencies served as dependent variables. Four factor, repeated measures analyses of variance revealed significant three-way interactions for all variables and subsequent analyses were necessary to assess main effects of one variable while two others were held constant. The effect of pictures was such that below average readers who received stories accompanied by pictures made more errors than any other group. Superior readers did not appear to be affected by the presence of pictures. Pictures also did not significantly alter comprehension scores or particular story error types for any group. Results on the effect of context were similar: below average readers made more errors on stories (in which contextual cues exist) while superior readers made equivalent numbers of errors on both stories and word lists. Difficulty of material was significant for all dependent measures. All groups made significant improvements in word recognition on difficult material over trials. Difficult material produced poorer performance by both superior and below average readers on comprehension and story error types, and in some cases, produced different error patterns for both groups. Experimenter aid also bettered performance of poorer readers. Effects of these variables on superior reading of easy material may have been obscured by basal effects in which superior readers made so few errors initially, that there was not much room for improvement over trials. Results of this study clearly support the hypothesis that pictures and context interfere with poorer readers' word-decoding performance and suggest that these readers rely on inappropriate strategies such as searching for meaning and contextual cues to learn to read. Superior readers appear to use both graphic and contextual information efficiently when reading easy material but tend to rely more on graphic cues on difficult material. Suggestions for more appropriate reading material for each group are made, based on these findings. These results are also discussed in light of developmental, attentional and psycholinguistic theories of reading ability.