Background: A significant portion of adults struggle to read at a basic level. Word reading (defined here as decoding and word recognition) appears to play a pivotal role for this population of readers; however, less is known about how word reading relates to other important semantic processes (e.g., vocabulary, sentence processing) known to…

The development of interest in reading and its relationship to reading ability was examined longitudinally in 117 children in Grades 1-3. Interest in reading was measured by eight items from the Elementary Reading Attitude Survey. Less able readers had lower interest in reading, but their development was parallel to that of more able readers.…

This 2-year longitudinal study examined both concurrent and longitudinal relations of a variety of reading-related cognitive tasks and Chinese word reading and word dictation among 187 Hong Kong Chinese kindergarteners aged 4-6. Homophone awareness, visual skills and syllable awareness were all uniquely associated with Chinese word reading across…

In this article, we discuss two characteristics of the majority of current behaviour- and molecular-genetic studies of reading ability and disability, specifically, the ascertainment strategies and the populations from which samples are selected. In the context of this discussion, we present data that we collected on a sample of Swahili-speaking…

Until recently there has been no nationally acceptable test for assessing reading for the higher grades (Five and Six) of the elementary schools in Greece. As part of an effort to validate such a test, evidence was gathered from teachers' rating scales. Seventy-two teachers from Fifth and Sixth Grades all over Greece evaluated their 1377 students'…