Science Daily reports this morning on a new study that documents how noisy classrooms can make it hard for children, especially those who struggle at distinguishing sounds such as "ba," "da," and "ga," to learn to read.

"The 'b,' 'd,' and 'g' consonants have rapidly changing acoustic information that the nervous system has to resolve to eventually match up sounds with letters on the page," Nina Kraus, the director of Northwestern University's auditory neuroscience laboratory, told Science Daily. "What your ear hears and what your brain interprets are not the same thing."

In the Northwestern study, the children who had the most trouble distinguishing those sounds tended to be poorer readers. Increasing levels of classroom noise, such as scraping chairs, chattering, and rustling papers, just made that task all the more difficult.

The researchers measured the accuracy of students' sound perception in two ways: through electrodes that picked up their brain-stem activity and by asking students to repeat sentences they heard.

I know this sounds like one of those research findings that fall under the category of common sense. But if common sense guided instructional practice, the "open classroom" movement might never have flourished. Remember how much noisier those classrooms were once the classroom partitions were rolled back?

According to Northwestern, the full study was scheduled to be published today on the Web site of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. At this writing, though, it hadn't been posted yet.

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Research has long shown that children who come to school with a rich storehouse of vocabulary words tend to have an easier time learning to read than peers who know fewer words. There's a huge gap, though, between preschoolers of different socioeconomic levels in terms of the number of words they learn at home.

One study estimates, in fact, that by the time they are four, children of professional families have heard nearly 30 million more words than those growing up in working-class homes. (See a good summary of the 30-million-word-gap study here.)

So it's no surprise that producers at WGBH Boston and Studio B Productions Inc. in

The six Martha books, written and illustrated by Susan Meddaugh, tell the story of Martha, a dog who becomes humorously loquacious whenever she eats alphabet soup. (My daughter loved to memorize all of Martha's long and chatty speeches, which are depicted in the books in a cartoon bubble.) Martha's talkative nature makes her the perfect vehicle for introducing children to some of the words the series tries to teach, such as "deserted," "neglected," or "recuperate."

In putting together the show, Martha Speaks, senior executive producer Carol Greenwald says, the production team called in some of the biggest research names in the field. They include: Andy Biemiller of the University of Toronto, David Dickinson of Vanderbilt University, Michael Graves of the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsbugh's Linda Kucan, Catherine Snow of Harvard University, Mariela Paez of Boston, and the University of Maryland's Rebecca Silverman, who is also the show's content director.

Greenwald says the researchers provided input on which words to teach and which words would be more challenging for the target age group, which is 4- to 7-year-olds. Silverman also observed Head Start preschool programs and preschools in affluent neighborhoods to round out the research.

"She also did a crash course on vocabulary for everyone who works on the show," said Greenwald, who also produced the Arthur educational TV series.

With financing from the U.S. Department of Education, researchers are now evaluating the educational effects of the Martha Speaks show, which began airing on public television stations in the fall. Those results are still a few months away, but in the meantime, here's a Monday morning treat, a cute video clip of a couple of young fans lip-syncing the show's theme song. You can also check out the show's interactive Web site for kids here.

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Most reading research over the last 25 years has focused on how to help children learn to sound out or decode words. Relatively fewer studies have tackled the thorny problem of helping students understand the words they're sounding out.

For instance, experts know that children who come to school with deeper stores of background knowledge, a richer vocabulary, or better oral-language skills tend to become better readers. The trick is how to help the students who lag behind their peers in those areas catch up and learn to read proficiently.

In an attempt to fill in the knowledge gap, the federal Institute of Education Sciences announced plans last week for an ambitious new research initiative called Reading for Understanding.

This is no typical research competition for IES, though. What the U.S. Department of Education agency wants to do is step up the pace of research on the problem over the next five years by putting together a mission team not unlike those that specialize in problems for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The R&D network that IES has in mind would include five core teams, each working on reading comprehension for a specific age span of students, such as grades 3 to 5 or grades 8 to 9. Scientists on each team would focus on understanding the underlying cognitive processes involved in reading comprehension, developing new instructional approaches to promote it, and figuring out if their interventions work. Another team would focus on advancing theoretical understanding of the problem and developing assessments to measure students' progress in acquiring reading-comprehension skills.

The size of the awards for the project will vary, but IES, in its formal request for applications for the program, says the grants for each core R&D team will range from $2 million to $4 million a year. The assessment team could qualify for up to $3 million a year for its work.

Interested? You have until Aug. 3 to submit a letter of intent.

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