In polysyllabic languages the assignment of stress is crucial for understanding the reading process. Here we review empirical evidence, drawn mainly from studies on Italian, and discuss critical issues in understanding reading. We first discuss the lexical and sublexical mechanisms responsible for stress assignment and propose that the former is…

We reintroduce a wide-angle view of reading comprehension, the Reading Systems Framework, which places word knowledge in the center of the picture, taking into account the progress made in comprehension research and theory. Within this framework, word-to-text integration processes can serve as a model for the study of local comprehension…

The degree to which orthographic knowledge accounts for the link between rapid automatized naming (RAN) and reading is contested, with mixed results reported. This longitudinal study compared two groups of 10- and 11-year-old children, a low RAN group (N = 69) and matched controls (N = 74), on various measures of orthographic knowledge. The low…

The purpose of the current study was to examine the mindless reading behavior of children. Across two studies, 2nd-grade students read passages while their eye movements were monitored. Trained raters then identified mindless reading behaviors from the eye movement records. Several important findings emerged. We were able to reliably identify…

Determining word meanings that ought to be taught or introduced is important for educators. A sequence for vocabulary growth can be inferred from many sources, including testing children's knowledge of word meanings at various ages, predicting from print frequency, or adult-recalled Age of Acquisition. A new approach, Word Maturity, is based…

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of morphological instruction on language and literacy outcomes by synthesizing 92 standardized mean differences (d) from 30 independent studies. Findings show a moderate overall effect of morphological instruction ([d-bar] = 0.32), suggesting that children receiving morphological instruction…

A new metric, Word Maturity, estimates the development by individual students of knowledge of every word in a large corpus. The metric is constructed by Latent Semantic Analysis modeling of word knowledge as a function of the reading that a simulated learner has done and is calibrated by its developing closeness in information content to that of a…

This study examined orthographic learning in oral and silent reading conditions. Dutch third graders read, either aloud or silently, short texts containing novel target (pseudo) words. The acquisition of new word-specific orthographic knowledge was assessed several days later by comparing target spellings with homophonic spellings in tasks…

It has been suggested that the differences observed for dyslexic readers compared to normal readers on tasks measuring visual sensitivity may simply be the result of differences between the two groups in general cognitive ability and/or attentional engagement. One common way to accommodate this proposal is to match normal and dyslexic readers on…

The lexical quality hypothesis (LQH) claims that variation in the quality of word representations has consequences for reading skill, including comprehension. High lexical quality includes well-specified and partly redundant representations of form (orthography and phonology) and flexible representations of meaning, allowing for rapid and reliable…

Despite nearly 40 years of scientific theorizing about reading, the field remains fragmented with little progress toward unification. In this article, we (a) emphasize the privileged position of unified theories in all science, (b) compare the growth of theory in cognitive science and reading, (c) identify the phenomenal domain of a unified…

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…

The present study used latent semantic analysis (LSA) to analyze verbal protocols that were collected while participants read expository passages. In the study, participants were asked to type their thoughts after reading each sentence of 2 scientific texts. The semantic similarity between the protocols and the current sentence and prior causal…

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…

Linkage studies of complex phenotypes such as reading ability/disability (developmental dyslexia or reading disorder) and related componential processes, where the effects attributable to individual genes appear to be modest, are critically dependent on the nature and composition of the samples and the phenotypes analyzed. Thus, it might be…