Perfetti's representational quality hypothesis suggests that orthographic learning in developing readers is associated with two important changes to the orthographic lexicon that drive continued word reading development, namely, addition of word-specific representations and acquisition of complex context-dependent decoding skills. Perfetti further…

Developmental studies examining relations between word reading (WR) and decoding in typical and dyslexic populations routinely cut the reading distribution to form distinct groups. However, dichotomizing continuous variables to study development is problematic for multiple reasons. Instead, we modeled and visualized the parallel growth of WR and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a virtual intensive reading intervention embedded with mindset training compared with typical reading instruction in a business-as-usual (BAU) condition delivered to fourth-grade students with or at risk for reading disabilities. After screening, the 59 participants were stratified and…

This study examined change in early language comprehension from 15 to 54 months for fifth-grade typical readers (n = 35), poor decoders (n = 11), or poor comprehenders (n = 16) from a nationally representative study of early child-care experiences. Changing measures of language comprehension were captured across early childhood for the 62…

This investigation examined the structural relations among latent variables of language, decoding, and reading comprehension, invariance of the patterns of predictions, and unique and common variance over two years in grade cohorts 5 to 6, 7 to 8, and 9 to 10. Participants were 321 students in grade 5 in six elementary schools, 299 students in…

We modeled word reading growth in typically developing (n = 118) and children with dyslexia (n = 20), Grades 2-5, across multiple exposures to 30 words. We explored the facilitative versus inhibitory effects of exposures to differential mixes of words that support high- versus low-frequency vowel pronunciations. One training corpus contained a…

This study examined the effectiveness of the intensive implementation of a multicomponent reading intervention ("Voyager Passport") with 306 fourth-grade students with severe reading difficulties. Students with reading comprehension achievement below the 15th percentile in the fall of fourth grade were randomly assigned to the intensive…

The present study examined the reading comprehension and receptive vocabulary skills of children with poor reading comprehension despite adequate decoding using a regression-based matching technique. Participants included five cohorts of children who were identified as typical readers (N = 70,493 - 75,553) or as children with specific reading…

This study examined the structure of oral language and reading and their relation to comprehension from a latent variable modeling perspective in Kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2. Participants were students in Kindergarten (n = 218), Grade 1 (n = 372), and Grade 2 (n = 273), attending Title 1 schools. Students were administered phonological…

This study investigates the effects and feasibility of an intervention for first-grade students at risk for reading difficulties or disabilities (RD). The intervention was provided by general education classroom teachers and consisted of 15 min whole-class comprehension lessons (Tier 1) and 30 min Tier 2 intervention sessions in word reading,…

The objective of this study was to explore dimensions of oral language and reading and their influence on reading comprehension in a relatively understudied population--adolescent readers in 4th through 10th grades. The current study employed latent variable modeling of decoding fluency, vocabulary, syntax, and reading comprehension so as to…

This study tested the theory that future poor comprehenders would show modest but pervasive deficits in both language comprehension and production during early childhood as compared with future poor decoders and typical readers. Using an existing database (NICHD ECCRN), fifth-grade students were identified as having poor comprehension skills…

The purpose of this project was to examine group- and individual-level responses by struggling adolescents readers (6th-8th grades; N = 155) to three different modalities of the same reading program, Reading Achievement Multi-Component Program. The three modalities differ in the combination of reading components (phonological decoding, spelling,…