The ability to make inferences is essential for effective language comprehension. While inferencing training benefits reading comprehension in school-aged children (see Elleman, 2017, for a review), we do not yet know whether it is beneficial to support the development of these skills prior to school entry. In a pre-registered randomised…

Polysemy, or the property of words having multiple meanings, is a prevalent feature of vocabulary. In this study we validated a new measure of polysemy knowledge for children with English as an additional language (EAL) and a first language (EL1) and examined the relationship between polysemy knowledge and age, language status, and reading…

We explored the vocabulary and metaphor comprehension of learners of English as an additional language (EAL) in the first two years of UK primary school. EAL vocabulary knowledge is believed to be a crucial predictor of (reading) comprehension and educational attainment (Murphy, 2018). The vocabulary of five- to seven-year-old children with EAL…

Establishing local coherence relations is central to text comprehension. Positive-causal coherence relations link a cause and its consequence, whereas negative-causal coherence relations add a contrastive meaning (negation) to the causal link. According to the cumulative cognitive complexity approach, negative-causal coherence relations are…

We tracked the developmental influences of exposure to French on developing English phonological awareness, decoding and reading comprehension of English-speaking at-risk readers from Grade 1 to Grade 3. Teacher-nominated at-risk readers were matched with not-at-risk readers in French immersion and English language programs. Exposure to spoken…

Research using online comprehension measures with monolingual children shows that speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition are correlated with lexical development. Here we examined speech processing efficiency in relation to vocabulary development in bilingual children learning both Spanish and English (n=26 ; 2 ; 6). Between-language…

The aims of this study were to investigate whether specific linguistic difficulties in preterm children persist at eight years and to examine the interrelationships between language and literacy in this population, compared with a control group of full-term children. Sixty-eight monolingual Italian preterms and 26 chronologically matched controls…

Investigated young children's ability to use narrative contexts to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary terms. Two groups of 15 7-and 8-year-olds participated; children with normally developing reading comprehension skills and children with weak reading comprehension skill. Results are discussed. (Author/VWL)

Discusses results of a study of good and poor third-grade readers that indicates that difficulties with phonetic representation could underlie the inferior sentence comprehension of poor beginning readers. In addition, the finding that these children place greater reliance on immature processing strategies raised further possibility that tempo of…

Investigates comprehension of metaphoric compounds. The study asked children and adults to identify referents of various types of these compounds. Findings reveal that 5-year-olds outperformed 3-year-olds but performed significantly less well than adults and that 3-year-olds did not generally interpret the compounds literally. (37 references)…