There are contradictory findings in the literature about prosodic sensitivity's contribution to reading. In this study, we examined whether prosodic sensitivity makes a unique contribution to different reading outcomes in German after controlling for the effects of phonological awareness. Word reading, nonword reading and sentence reading as well…

Purpose: This study investigated how correlations between rapid automatized naming (RAN) and reading depend on characteristics of the stimuli. RAN tasks using stimuli with high phonological demands were predicted to be the strongest correlates of decoding efficiency, while high semantic demands were predicted to lead to stronger correlations with…

This study investigated the strength of lexical and non-lexical processing among Arabic (L1) English (L3)-speaking children (fourth and fifth grades, N = 532) in two writing systems that vary in terms of transparency. Children were assessed using word reading, phonological and vocabulary measures. In Arabic, the study focused on standard form.…

This study compared the sentence hyperbole comprehension performance of Chinese poor readers with various levels of arithmetic proficiency. A total of 168 Chinese poor readers in Grade 1 were recruited, and their nonverbal intelligence, verbal working memory, Chinese receptive vocabulary, Chinese grammatical knowledge, character reading and…

Effects of semantic versus syntactic constraints on resolution of Hebrew heterophonic-homographic words were examined at three reading skill levels. Fourth-and sixth-grade students and a group of adults read aloud sentences containing two types of heterophonic-homographs: noun-noun (e.g., BYCH [Hebrew characters] is read as beitsa 'egg' and bitsa…

The current study examined the extent to which sixth grade students used their pre-existing topic beliefs to guide comprehension of semantic ideas within multiple conflicting texts, and the sources providing them. Adolescents completed an inventory assessing their pre-reading topic beliefs one week prior to the study. During the study, students…

Reading acquisition involves connections between the spoken language and the writing system. The English-language writing system holds an inconsistent alphabetic system, thus encouraging readers to develop representations between the grapheme and the word. Reading in English as a Foreign language supposes a challenge, especially when the reader's…

Word boundary information is not marked explicitly in Chinese sentences and word ambiguity happens in Chinese texts. This introduces difficulty to parse characters into words when reading Chinese sentences, especially for beginning readers. In an eye-tracking study, we tested whether explicit word boundary information as provided by alternating…

In the present study, 151 third-grade Hong Kong children participated in two expression-picture matching experiments (a relation priming paradigm). In this paradigm, an unambiguous prime was first presented, followed by an ambiguous target that could be interpreted with either of two relations (i.e., Descriptor and Possessor). Children were asked…

An experiment examined orthographic facilitation of vocabulary learning, that is, whether showing students spellings of novel words during learning helps them remember the words when spellings are no longer present. The purpose was to determine whether having students decode the spellings of vocabulary words improves word learning over passive…

This study investigated how word and child characteristics affect children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words. Participants were fourth- and fifth-graders representing native English speakers (NE) and bilingual learners with fluent English proficiency (FEP) and designated English Learners (EL). Students were taught the meanings of a…

This study investigates the concurrent and longitudinal relationships between polysemous word knowledge and reading comprehension among bilingual students (n = 107) followed from seventh to eighth grade. Standardized tests were used to measure decoding skills, broad vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension. Data about students' polysemous…

Text complexity in elementary classrooms is typically measured by traditional readability tools, which rely on surface-level measures of word and sentence complexity. Theoretical and empirical work on text complexity, however, indicates that additional measures of semantics, syntax, and discourse structure may be equally important for…

A 3-year longitudinal study among 239 Chinese students in Grades 2-4 was conducted to investigate the relationships between orthographic skills (including positional and functional knowledge of semantic radicals and phonetic radicals, and orthographic memory of radicals) and Chinese literacy skills (word reading, word spelling, reading…

This study investigated Chinese children's development of sensitivity to positional (orthographic), phonological, and semantic cues of radicals in encoding novel Chinese characters. A newly designed picture-novel character mapping task, along with nonverbal reasoning ability, vocabulary, and Chinese character recognition were administered to 198…