Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word…

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…

The purposes of this study were to: (1) build an appropriate model for predicting primary schoolchildren's English vocabulary knowledge; (2) examine whether the developed model applies to new data; and (3) discuss how to apply the model to L2 vocabulary instruction. More specifically, the study asked third- and fourth-grade public primary school…

We examined the instability of reading errors, that is whether a child reads the same word sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly, as a function of the complexity of context-sensitive spelling rules (vowel degemination and consonant gemination). Dutch bisyllabic words were read twice by typical readers in Grades 2 and 3, and reading-level…

This study examines, within the domain of science, the characteristics of words that predict word knowledge and word learning. The authors identified a set of word characteristics--length, part of speech, polysemy, frequency, morphological frequency, domain specificity, and concreteness--that, based on earlier research, were prime candidates to…

Morphological skills have been associated with performance on multiple literacy outcomes. While growth in derived word knowledge has been documented during mid-elementary grades, little research has studied the development of knowledge of specific morphemes, separate from whole-word knowledge. This study examined the development of knowledge of a…

The acquisition of reading skill was studied in 503 Italian children in first to eighth grade using a task that required reading of lists of words and non-words. Analysis of the metric characteristics of the measures indicated that reading speed but not accuracy was normally distributed across all ages considered. The role of specific effects…

This study investigates the syllable's role in the normal reading acquisition of French children at three grade levels (1st, 3rd, and 5th), using a modified version of Cole, Magnan, and Grainger's (1999) paradigm. We focused on the effects of syllable frequency and word frequency. The results suggest that from the first to third years of reading…

We examined how children with and without oral language (word-finding) difficulties (WFD) perform on oral reading (OR) versus silent reading recognition (SRR) tasks when reading the same words and how lexical factors influenced OR accuracy, error patterns, and nature of miscues. Primary-grade students were administered an experimental reading…