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…

We investigate the development of text reconstruction abilities in Hebrew-speaking children, with a particular focus on verbal passive constructions. The acquisition of verbal passives in Hebrew is a late developmental milestone, closely tied to the expression of event semantics. The current study explores how narrative and informative text genres…

Research has investigated how lexical-semantic and participant factors impact word learning in young children and adults. However, limited information pertaining to expressive vocabulary development exists for school-aged bilinguals--particularly those with developmental language disorder (DLD). Cross-linguistic differences in the semantic…

While behavioral and educational data characterize a fourth grade shift in reading development, neuroscience evidence is relatively lacking. We used the N400 component of the event-related potential waveform to investigate the development of single word processing across the upper elementary years, in comparison to adult readers. We presented…

This investigation examined orthographic and semantic processing during reading acquisition. Children in first to fourth grade were presented with a target word and two response alternatives, and were asked to identify the semantic match. Words were presented in four conditions: an exact match and unrelated foil (STONE-STONE-EARS), an exact match…

This study addresses whether reading involves a process termed semantic and phonological ability to adjust recoding (SPAAR). It was hypothesized that SPAAR helps readers link inaccurate pronunciations to lexical entries (e.g., "spynitch" to "spinach"). Psychometric properties of the Mispronunciation Correction Task (MCT), a…

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that sentence processing is an essential mediatory skill between word recognition and text comprehension in reading. In Experiment 1, a semantic similarity judgement task was used with children from Grade 2 to Grade 9. They had to say whether two written sentences had the same (or very similar)…

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…

Particularly in primary school, good performance on copy tasks is an important working technique. With respect to writing skills, copying is a very basic process on which more complex writing abilities are based. We studied the copying ability of second and fourth graders across four types of symbols which vary with respect to their semantic and…

Background: Studies on rewording word problems can be grouped into two main groups: situational rewording, in which the situation denoted by the text is described more richly, and conceptual rewording, in which the underlying semantic relations are highlighted. Aims: Our aims are to define and distinguish these two kinds of rewording and to test…

The present study examined whether specific item characteristics, such as mode of acquisition (MoA) of word meanings, make reading comprehension tests particularly difficult for deaf children. Reading comprehension data on nearly 13,000 hearing 7-to-12-year-olds and 253 deaf 7-to-20-year-olds were analyzed, divided across test levels from second…

The present longitudinal study investigated the relationship between pre-school semantic skills (vocabulary, comprehension and sentence construction), phonological awareness and later word decoding and reading comprehension skills. More than 200 Danish children were followed from a speech therapist screening at the age of three, through a…