Many children struggle to learn to read, and these difficulties can persist well into adulthood. To address this problem, researchers have investigated the processes that underlie reading. An informative body of work has thus identified basic skills (e.g., decoding, vocabulary knowledge) as necessary for successful reading. Researchers also have…

This study had two aims: first, to investigate how emerging reading and spelling are interlinked when children move up from preschool to primary school and, second, to examine the antecedents of these skills. The study is part of the Jyvaskyla Entrance into Primary School Study in which 196 children 5 to 6 years of age were followed up every half…

The five articles in this special issue are a blend of experimental and correlational approaches that exemplify advances in contemporary approaches to assessment of reading comprehension. They illustrate how inferences about reading comprehension are determined in part by the material presented for comprehending and the format that is used for…

This article is based on the presidential address I delivered at the 12th annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, held in June 2005 in Toronto. I trace the development of my interest in instructional research in, first, beginning reading and, more recently, in comprehension, and I describe studies designed to improve the…

Recent theoretical advances in working memory guided analyses of cognitive measures in 122 children with dyslexia and their 200 affected biological parents in families with a multigenerational history of dyslexia. Both children and adults were most severely impaired, on average, in three working memory components- phonological word-form storage,…

Castles and Coltheart (2004) argued that the causal link between children's underlying phonological awareness and success in learning to read remains unproven. We argue that the balance of evidence does favor such a causal link. We also argue, however, that learning to read depends on broader language skills and that, like other aspects of…

The transition from first-generation to second-generation studies of genetic and environmental influences on the development of reading is underway. The first generation of quantitative genetic studies yielded an extraordinary conclusion: Fifty percent or more of the variance in most constructs, including reading, is attributable to genetic…

Environment and Genes are often found in the titles of my articles, but this is the first and most likely the last of my titles to include SSSR. This article is based on my presidential address at the 10th annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR) in Boulder, Colorado (2003), so I begin with some reflection on the…

An understanding of the processing underlying single word reading will provide insight into how skilled reading is achieved, with important implications for reading education and impaired reading. Investigation of the functional neuroanatomy of both the mature and the developing systems will be critical for reaching this understanding. To this…

Sentences convey relationships between the meanings of words, such as who is accomplishing an action or receiving it. Functional neuroimaging based on positron-emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging has been used to identify areas of the brain involved in structuring sentences and determining aspects of meaning associated…

In recent years, significant progress has been made in the study of reading and reading disability with the use of functional neuroimaging techniques. There is substantial converging evidence that skilled word recognition requires the development of a highly integrated cortical system that includes left hemisphere dorsal, ventral, and anterior…

Research on how the brain implements reading has produced results of remarkable consistency, especially on the functional anatomy of single word reading. We examine the general features of this emerging knowledge and draw attention to the extent to which it converges with results from other methods of reading science in several areas: reading…

In reading research, morphological processing and monomorphemic word identification have generally been treated separately. We describe a computational model that brings both kinds of reading together within a single framework. This model assumes that word knowledge-the orthography, phonology, and meaning of words-accumulates with experiences with…

Provides a personal account of the development of the Eye Movement Contingent Display Control research methodology for the study of perceptual and cognitive processes in reading. Suggests that the usefulness of eye movement techniques for studying human cognition is still in its beginning stages. (RS)