Background: Executive function (EF) plays a crucial role in children's reading. However, previous studies were based on offline products of reading comprehension. Online research is needed to reveal the core mechanisms underlying children's reading processing. By measuring children's working memory (WM) and cognitive flexibility (CF), we…

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…

Previous studies demonstrated that outdated information may be reactivated and disrupt subsequent processing of newly encoded information. However, previous studies focused on the impact of outdated information that had been backgrounded in memory. The present experiments examined the immediate influence of outdated information; backgrounding…

Objective: Our objective was to examine the role of semantics in the relation between syntactic awareness and contextual facilitation in word reading. Methods: Grade 3 children (N = 77) completed a syntactic awareness task in which we manipulated the possible reliance on semantic information. They also completed a task of word reading in isolation…

Skilled reading involves rapid and automatic word recognition. Through a self-teaching process, phonological decoding during reading is thought to establish the word-specific representations in memory that support efficient word reading. Much is known about orthographic learning during reading; less is understood about this process during…

The relevance of reading prosody on reading comprehension has been theoretically proposed and empirically recognised. The present study aimed to investigate longitudinal and concurrent relationships between reading prosody and reading comprehension processes, beyond decoding and word reading efficiency. Two cohorts of Portuguese children, ranging…

Background: While much is known about how morphological awareness (MA) contributes to reading development, little attention has been paid to how reading may conversely affect MA development, particularly in readers of Chinese in a bilingual/multilingual setting. Methods: The study adopted a cross-lagged panel design. Young bilingual readers of…

Background: This study examined the development of stress sensitivity and its relationship with word reading. Previous research has rarely measured phoneme and stress sensitivity in the same task, making a direct comparison of the contribution between the two in reading development difficult. Methods: Participants were native English-speaking…

Background: There is emerging evidence that individuals with developmental dyslexia show deficits in visual-spatial attention. This study focused on visual searches and examined whether visual search deficits would be found in Chinese children with dyslexia. More importantly, we examined the associations between dyslexia and distinct types of…

Background: The aim of this longitudinal study was to examine the relationship between character reading and spelling and to explore the role of reading-related skills in Chinese literacy. Methods: A test battery that included measures of morphological awareness (homophone awareness and compound word awareness), orthographic awareness, rapid…

An investigation into the impact of predictive text use upon the literacy skills of primary school, secondary school and university cohorts was conducted over the course of a year. No differences in use of text abbreviations ("textisms") were found between predictive text users and nonusers. However, secondary school children who used…

This study investigates the within- and cross-language relations between orthographic processing and spelling for children learning to read in languages that share the same Roman script: namely, English and French. We examined these relations in a group of 152 children attending grade 1 in a French immersion program. Measures of English and French…

This study examined the dimensionality of morphological knowledge. The performance of 371 seventh- and eighth-graders on seven morphological knowledge tasks was investigated using confirmatory factor analysis. Results suggested that morphological knowledge was best fit by a bifactor model with a general factor of morphological knowledge and seven…

The goal of the study was to examine the association between visual-attentional span and lexical decision in skilled adult readers. In the span tasks, an array of letters was presented briefly and recognition or production of a single cued letter (partial span) or production of all letters (whole span) was required. Independently of letter…

We present the results of an empirical test of the hypothesis that transfer of orthographic processing to reading occurs when the scripts under acquisition are written with the same unit (specifically, the same alphabet). We tested 97 Spanish-English bilingual children in Grades 4 and 7. We measured mother's education level, verbal and nonverbal…