Reading fluency (RF) involves the automaticity of many distinct reading skills (e.g., pacing, word recognition, phonological awareness) and allows cognitive resources to be allocated to higher-order reading skills (e.g., comprehension, synthesis). Early identification of students at-risk for RF deficits is critical, but many screeners require a…

This article examines current research on the role and importance of lower-level processes in second language (L2) reading. The focus is on word recognition and its subcomponent processes, including various phonological and orthographic processes. Issues related to syntactic and semantic processes and their relationship with word recognition are…

A meta-analysis was conducted to examine the construct validity of language aptitude by synthesizing the existing research that has been accumulated over the past five decades. The study aimed to provide a thorough understanding of the construct by aggregating the data reported in the primary research on its correlations with other individual…

Investigates how well kindergarten phonological awareness (PA) and naming speed (NS) account for reading development to Grade 5. PA was most strongly related to reading in the first two years of school, and NS's initially weaker relationship increased with grade level. Children with weak PA and slow NS were most likely to develop reading…

Review of the contribution of various oral language abilities to early reading performances found that, although phonemic awareness was the best predictor of early reading skills, metasyntactic ability also often accounted for significant variance. Once children acquire initial decoding skills, narrative discourse and other metalinguistic skills…

This executive summary discusses our current understanding of the difficulties that children with reading/learning disabilities encounter as they start down the road to reading and summarizes research on early identification and intervention. The focus is on children in kindergarten through second grade. Findings from the analysis indicate: (1)…

This article highlights the link between lexical and phonological acquisition by considering learning by children beyond the 50-word stage and by applying cognitive models of spoken word processing to development. The effects of lexical and phonological variables on perception, production, and learning are discussed in the context of a…

Drawing on recent psychological and neurological research on how individual differences might interact with learning a particular language, the study examines how psycholinguistic research and theory can help in assigning military personnel to language training and to a given language. Using the Defense Language Institute's Defense Language…