Skilled reading involves rapid and automatic word recognition. Through a self-teaching process, phonological decoding during reading is thought to establish the word-specific representations in memory that support efficient word reading. Much is known about orthographic learning during reading; less is understood about this process during…

Background: The importance of reading motivation has led to the development of a large number of self-report reading motivation measures; however, there is still a need for a usable measure of adolescent reading motivation that captures a large number of theoretically and empirically distinct constructs. Methods: The current paper details the…

Background: It is well evident that individuals' levels of print exposure are significantly correlated with their reading ability across languages, and an author recognition test is commonly used to measure print exposure objectively. For the first time, the current work developed and validated a Simplified Chinese Author Recognition Test (SCART)…

Background: Previous work suggests that children can teach themselves new written words via reading aloud texts independently (i.e., orthographic learning via self-teaching). In self-teaching in Chinese, regular phonetic radicals and transparent semantic radicals facilitate orthographic learning. The present study examined the roles of phonetic…

Background: There is increasing recognition of the contribution of affective factors such as motivation to the development of reading competence. Reading activity is theorised to mediate associations between motivation and achievement, but this has been tested empirically only rarely. Method: This study employed structural equation modelling to…

Reading fluency is a major determinant of reading comprehension but depends on moderating factors such as auditory working memory (AWM), word recognition and sentence reading skills. We investigated how word and sentence reading skills relate to reading comprehension differentially across the first 6 years of schooling and tested which reading…

Background: Efficient word identification is directly tied to strong mental representations of words, which include spellings, meanings and pronunciations. Orthographic learning is the process by which spellings for individual words are acquired. Methods: In the present study, we combined the classic self-teaching paradigm with eye tracking to…

This study set out to develop a Chinese Author Recognition Test (CART) that might be used as a measure of objective print exposure for college students in Taiwan. We found that there is a linkage between print exposure and general reading achievement for college students. We also found that, among self-reported reading habits, comparative reading…

Background: Word-to-text integration (WTI) can be challenging for second-language (L2) learners, although it can positively contribute to reading comprehension. The present study examined the role of WTI, after controlling for decoding, vocabulary and morphosyntactic awareness, in predicting English as an L2 reading comprehension development in…

The present study examined the possibility that spelling fulfils a self-teaching function in the acquisition of orthographic knowledge because, like decoding, it requires close attention to letter order and identity as well as to word-specific spelling-sound mapping. We hypothesised that: (i) spelling would lead to significant (i.e. above-chance)…

The current work examines children's sensitivity to rime unit spelling-sound correspondences within the context of early word reading as a way of assessing word-specific influences on early word-reading strategies. Sixty 6-7-year-olds participated in an experimental reading task that comprised word items that shared either frequent or infrequent…

This study examined word identification, phonological recoding efficiency, familiar word reading efficiency, orthographic choice for familiar words and serial naming speed as potential correlates of orthographic learning following silent reading in third-grade children. Children silently read a series of short stories, each containing six…