Eye movements of Chinese readers were recorded for sentences in which high- and low-frequency target words were presented normally or with reduced stimulus quality in two experiments. We found stimulus quality and word frequency produced strong additive effects on fixation durations for target words. The results demonstrate that stimulus quality…

Hyperlexia is a syndrome of reading without meaning in individuals who otherwise have pronounced cognitive and language deficits. The present study investigated the quality of word representation and the effects of deficient semantic processing on word and nonword reading of Korean children with hyperlexia; their performances were compared to…

The relationships of different levels of phonological processing (sounds in heard and spoken words for whole words, syllables, phonemes, and rimes) to multi-leveled functional reading or writing systems were studied. Participants in this cross-sectional study were students in fourth-grade (n = 119, mean age 116.5 months) and sixth-grade (n = 105,…

This study investigated the efficacy of a multi-component reading comprehension instructional approach, Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), compared to business-as-usual instructional methods with 19 teachers and 1074 students in middle school social studies and science classrooms in a large urban district. Researchers collaborated with school…

The current study examined the effect of pointing to the words and using highlighted text by examining eye movements when children in preschool, Grade 1 and 2 were read storybooks of two levels of difficulty. For all children, pointing to and highlighting the text was observed to increase the amount of time and number of fixations on the printed…

Orthographic processing is a construct that encompasses the skills of recognizing, storing, accessing, and applying the print conventions of a writing system. Few studies have investigated orthographic processing in dyslexic children and it is not yet clear whether lexical and sublexical orthographic processing are both impaired in these children.…

We investigated the relationship between 28 teachers' theoretical orientations to writing instruction and self-reported instructional practices and student writing performance. First-, second-, and third-grade teachers completed the Teacher Writing Orientation Scale developed by Graham, Harris, MacArthur, and Fink (2002) and reported the frequency…

The simple view of reading proposes that reading comprehension is the product of word reading and language comprehension. In this study, we used the simple view framework to examine the early prediction of reading comprehension abilities. Using multiple measures for all constructs, we assessed word reading precursors (i.e., letter knowledge,…

The present study investigated language skills and reading comprehension with English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children in grades 2-5. Of the 377 children in the sample, 207 were English monolingual and 170 were Spanish-English bilingual. Data were collected within a cohort-sequential design for two academic years in the fall and…

Linguistic knowledge, cognitive ability, and instruction influence how adults acquire a second orthography yet it remains unclear how different forms of instruction influence grain size sensitivity and subsequent decoding skill and speed. Thirty-seven monolingual, literate English-speaking adults were trained on a novel artificial orthography…

This study examined differences between adults with low literacy skills and typically achieving children, who were matched on decoding ability, on their production of morphologically complex words (MC) in oral and written stories. In addition, we collected data on their morphological awareness, spelling, and vocabulary skills. Both adults and…

This study examined the effect of dialect variation on children's spelling by using devoicing of final /d/ in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a test case. In line with the linguistic interference hypothesis, African American 6-year-olds were significantly poorer at spelling the final "d" of words such as "salad"…

Children described as "poor comprehenders" (PCs) have reading comprehension difficulties in spite of adequate word reading abilities. PCs are known to display weakness with semantics and higher-level aspects of oral language, but less is known about their grammatical skills, especially with regard to morphosyntax. The purpose of this…

Many English phonemes have more than one possible spelling. People's choices among the options may be influenced by sublexical patterns, such as the identity of neighboring sounds within the word. However, little research has explored the possible role of lexical conditioning. Three experiments examined the potential effects of one such factor:…

Narratives typically consist of information on multiple aspects of a situation. In order to successfully create a coherent representation of the described situation, readers are required to monitor all these situational dimensions during reading. However, little is known about whether these dimensions differ in the ease with which they can be…