Research Projects Funded by IDA A Study of "Pure" Fluency: Comparing Fluent and Dysfluent Readers without the Confounding Effects of Decoding Problems Research was completed in May of 2001 on 125 elementary school pupils in Voronezh, Russia. The children were given an extensive battery of tests on reading and the precursors of reading, including rapid naming, lexical decision, and other speeded tests of words and numbers. Our results suggest that the functions that distinguish fluent readers from others is (1) a sufficiently developed lexical memory to allow rapid access to phonological representations (the names of things), (2) the rapid translation of orthography to the appropriate phonology (as indexed by letter naming), and (3) a large lexicon. We note that all three of the predictor tasks, RAN-Objects, RAN-Letters, and Lexical Decision Nonwords, are tasks in which children can take advantage of item repetition. Thus, we are encouraged in our overarching hypothesis that it is the ability to learn adaptively from repetition that is related to fluent word recognition. |