Frawley Walsh, B. & Lamberts, F. (1979). Errorless discrimination and picture fading as techniques for teaching sight words to TMR students. American Journal of Mental Deficiency, 83(5), 473-479.

The effectiveness of two approaches for teaching beginning sight word to 30 TMR students was compared. In Dorry and Zeaman' s picture-fading technique, words are taught through association with pictures that are faded out over a series of trials, while in the Edmark program errorless-discrimination technique, words are taught through shaped sequences of visual and auditory-visual matching-to-sample, with the target word first appearing alone and eventually appearing with orthographically similar words. Students were instructed on two lists of 10 words each, one list in the picture-fading and one in the discrimination method, in a double counter-balanced, repeated-measures design. Covariance analysis on three measures (word identification, word recognition, and picture-word matching) showed highly significant differences between the two methods. Students' performance was better after instruction with the errorless-discrimination method than after instruction with the picture-fading method. The findings on picture fading were interpreted as indicating a possible failure of the shifting of control from picture to printed word that earlier researchers have hypothesized as occuring.