The sentences in texts are far more complex and diverse than those that children commonly encounter in oral language. This raises interesting questions as to whether the understanding of some sentence types might be more important than others in children's reading comprehension. Accordingly, we examined the relation between children's reading…

Learning to compose texts adequate for different purposes is crucial for becoming literate. We examined developmental changes in the rhetorical structure of written texts produced by Spanish children throughout the early years of elementary school in the light of descriptive writing purposes. Children had also performed tasks to test…

A collection of cognitive, linguistic, and spelling measures were administered to third-grade English L1 and L2 learners. To capture formative assessments of children's developing mental graphemic representations (MGRs), spelling errors in isolation were subjected to analysis across three metrics: (1) Phonological constrained; (2)…

This study examines the genetic and environmental etiology underlying the development of oral language and reading skills, and the relationship between them, over a long period of developmental time spanning middle childhood and adolescence. It focuses particularly on the differential relationship between language and two different aspects of…

To further explore contextual reading rate, an important aspect of reading fluency, we examined the relationship between word reading efficiency (WRE) and contextual oral reading rate (ORR), the degree to which they overlap across different comprehension measures, whether oral language (semantics and syntax) predicts ORR beyond contributions of…

Relationships between attention/executive functions and language learning were investigated in students in Grades 4 to 9 (N = 88) with and without specific learning disabilities (SLDs) in multiword syntax in oral and written language (OWL LD), word reading and spelling (dyslexia), and subword letter writing (dysgraphia). Prior…

The overall objective of this article is to examine how oral language abilities relate to reading profiles in English language learners (ELLs) and English as a first language (EL1) learners, and the extent of similarities and differences between ELLs and EL1s in three reading subgroups: normal readers, poor decoders, and poor comprehenders. The…