The present study investigated the effects of discrimination pretraining upon the intralist-similarity phenomenon in developing beginning reading skills. The response measures included rate of learning, amount of word recognition, and amount of word generalization. The findings showed that the high intralist-similarity groups required more learning trials but demonstrated greater word-recognition skills than the low intralist-similarity groups regardless of whether or not pretraining was used. Discrimination pretraining did, however, increase the rate of learning in beginning reading.
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