English-speaking preschoolers who knew letters but were nonreaders (M = 4 years 9 months; n = 60) were taught to segment consonant-vowel (CV), VC, and CVC words into phonemes either with letters and pictures of articulatory gestures (the LPA condition) or with letters only (the LO condition). A control group received no treatment. Both trained…

We explore the relationships between basic auditory processing, phonological awareness, vocabulary, and word reading in a sample of 95 children, 55 typically developing children, and 40 children with low IQ. All children received nonspeech auditory processing tasks, phonological processing and literacy measures, and a receptive vocabulary task.…

We investigate the effects of age-related factors and formal instruction on the development of reading-related skills in children aged 4 and 7 years. Age effects were determined by comparing two groups of children at the onset of formal schooling; one aged 7 (later-schooled) and one aged 4 (earlier-schooled). Schooling effects were measured by…

Although it is well recognized that reading skills vary in people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), reasons for this variability are not well understood. We used the simple view of reading model to investigate both word decoding and text comprehension processes in two well-established subtypes within the autism spectrum, those with…

High sensation seekers (HSS) prefer messages that allow them to maintain an optimal level of arousal (i.e., highly arousing messages). Transportation theory suggests that narrative immersion in a story may moderate reader arousal, and thus HSS message selection. To test this idea, a survey was administered to 120 fourth and fifth graders. In…

The influence of orthographic transparency on the prevalence of dyslexia subtypes was examined in a review of multiple-case studies conducted in languages differing in orthographic depth (English, French, and Spanish). Cross-language differences are found in the proportion of dissociated profiles as a function of the dependent variables (speed or…

The spellings of 39 profoundly deaf users of cochlear implants, aged 6 to 12 years, were compared with those of 39 hearing peers. When controlled for age and reading ability, the error rates of the 2 groups were not significantly different. Both groups evinced phonological spelling strategies, performing better on words with more typical…

The contributions of six important reading-related skills (phonological awareness, rapid naming, orthographic skills, morphological awareness, listening comprehension, and syntactic skills) to Chinese word and text reading were examined among 290 Chinese first graders in Hong Kong. Rapid naming, but not phonological awareness, was a significant…

Does the choice of test for assessing reading comprehension influence the outcome of genetic analyses? A twin design compared two types of reading comprehension tests classified as primarily associated with word decoding (RC-D) or listening comprehension (RC-LC). For both types of tests, the overall genetic influence is high and nearly identical.…

In the present study, we examined oral and silent reading fluency and their relations with reading comprehension. In a series of structural equation models with latent variables using data from 316 first-grade students, (a) silent and oral reading fluency were found to be related yet distinct forms of reading fluency, (b) silent reading fluency…

Serial rapid automized naming (RAN) has been often found to correlate more strongly with reading than discrete RAN. This study aimed to demonstrate that the strength of the RAN-reading fluency relationship is dependent on the format of both RAN and the reading task if the reading task consists of sight words. Seventy-one first-grade, 74…

The present study investigated proximal and distal predictors of reading comprehension by including latent factors such as alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness, semantic knowledge, word reading, oral reading fluency, and reading comprehension. The sample consisted of 79 five-year-old Korean-monolingual children who were assessed at the end…

Three self-paced reading experiments examined the effect of context on interpreting subsequent sentences and in the difficulty of revising initial misinterpretations of subsequent temporarily ambiguous sentences. Target sentences containing noun phrase/sentence (NP/S) coordination ambiguities were preceded by contexts that either did or did not…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relations among oral and silent reading fluency and reading comprehension for students in Grades 6 to 8 (n = 1,421) and the use of fluency scores to identify middle school students who are at risk for failure on a high-stakes reading test. Results indicated moderate positive relations between…

We report a study of incremental learning of new word meanings over multiple episodes. A new method called MESA (Markov Estimation of Semantic Association) tracked this learning through the automated assessment of learner-generated definitions. The multiple word learning episodes varied in the strength of contextual constraint provided by…