This study explored performance on expressive and receptive graphic symbol tasks and spoken comprehension by individuals who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) as well as the relationship of performance with participants' skills and characteristics. Participants were 19 children and youth (aged 5- to 18-years-old) who used aided…

Reading comprehension relies on the integration of phonological, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic language abilities and early reading success is attributed to several interrelated factors. The current study investigated one of these skills, phonological awareness and its relation to six-year-old children's mastery in reading Maltese and English.…

Purpose: We performed a meta-analysis to examine if children with dyslexia experience deficits in morphological awareness (MA) and if the effect sizes are influenced by different moderators (age, aspect of MA measured, type of MA task, language, modality input, semantic knowledge, and selection criteria). Method: We reviewed 40 studies published…

This study identifies the various functions of open questions in whole-class teaching in language arts classrooms in primary school, and it explores how these questions may work as a mediating tool. Open questions are considered a valuable tool in classroom discourse, enhancing dialogue and students' learning by giving the students an opportunity…

Previous research in alphabetic languages has shown that both position (external, internal) and distance (adjacent, nonadjacent) modulate letter position encoding during reading. To examine the generality of this pattern for a comprehensive model of word recognition and reading, we examined these effects during Chinese reading (i.e., an unspaced…

The present experiment provides an investigation of a promising new tool, the masked priming same-different task, for investigating the orthographic coding process. Orthographic coding is the process of establishing a mental representation of the letters and letter order in the word being read which is then used by readers to access higher-level…

The teacher's dilemma presents various strategies for teaching content area reading. Teachers the content subject area should be willing to accept the fact that their role as teachers is vital to the success of his students. Students cannot be expected to read the textbook as they would the local newspaper or a novel. Students need to be taught…

Background: This study examined the developmental relationship between Chinese children's compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge following a 4-year longitudinal design. Methods: A test battery that included measures of vocabulary knowledge, compounding awareness, nonverbal IQ, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, orthographic…

Many words in English resemble one another in multiple ways. Words with similar spellings are referred to as "orthographic neighbors." The purpose of this within-subject experimental study was to examine the effect of orthographic neighbors on the spelling acquisition of second-grade students. In each of five sessions of a computer-based…

Since there are no spaces between words to mark word boundaries in Chinese, it is common to see 2 identical neighboring characters in natural text. Usually, this occurs when there are 2 adjacent words containing the same character (we will call such a coincidental sequence of 2 identical characters "repeated characters"). In the present…

The present study investigated whether and to what extent children with dyslexia utilize visual and phonetic strategies in character learning. A paired associate learning paradigm was used in two experiments to train children's pronunciation-orthography associations of novel words, with a recall task 1 week later for retention. Experiment 1…

The opaque English orthography complicates learning to read, as irregular words, such as the word "pint," cannot be Addread accurately by decoding. Studies with first language (L1) English children show that vocabulary facilitates word reading, especially in the case of irregular words. It is unclear whether this influence of vocabulary…

Research on literacy has become universal and is essential for researchers of various disciplines, educators, and psychologists. For this article, we examined the most important methodological challenges that arise when conducting literacy research across languages, some of which have long been acknowledged in the relevant literature.…

Purpose: As an initial step in determining whether a spelling error analysis might be useful in measuring children's linguistic knowledge, the relation between the frequency of types of scores from a spelling error analysis and children's performance on measures of phonological and orthographic pattern awareness was examined. Method: The spellings…

Little research has been conducted on Arabic letter knowledge. This study investigates the nature of Arabic letter knowledge, its dimensionality, and the relative difficulty of letter knowledge items, all within an item response theory (IRT) framework. Three letter knowledge tests were administered to 142 native Arabic-speaking kindergarteners…