Young Adult Literacy Problems: Prevalence and Treatment

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Functional illiteracy in the young adult population (ages 18 to 25) is not only a drain on the nation's economic productivity; it is also documented as a major obstacle to adequate health care and a major independent risk factor for depression and suicide. The proposed research, responsive to an NIH request for applications, has two major phases (1) determine the prevalence of poor reading skills in the young adult population; and (2) compare treatment regimes for efficacy. The latter is accomplished by a design that will permit the isolation of effective types of instruction in four areas known to be crucial to reading in children, and suspected to be so in adults; (a) phonological decoding (sounding out words), (b) fluency (i.e., automatic "translation" from the letter code to the sound code and ultimately to the meaning; (c) vocabulary; and (d) text comprehension. It is expected that the different types of instruction will be differentially effective for persons with different skill profiles of strength and weakness.