Background: Prominent theories of reading make the prediction that individual differences in children's word learning capacity determine the pace of their acquisition of reading skill. Despite the developmental nature of some of these theories, most empirical research to date has explored the relation between word learning capacity and reading at…

Background: Word-to-text integration (WTI) can be challenging for second-language (L2) learners, although it can positively contribute to reading comprehension. The present study examined the role of WTI, after controlling for decoding, vocabulary and morphosyntactic awareness, in predicting English as an L2 reading comprehension development in…

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…

This study explored components of language comprehension (vocabulary, grammar, and higher-level language) skills for poor comprehenders in French immersion. We identified three groups of bilingual comprehenders (poor, average, and good) based on English reading performance and compared their language comprehension skills in English L1 and French…

Background: In countries with German as an official language, children with German as a second language perform overall worse in school than their German native speaking peers. This particularly affects written language skills, which require advanced language knowledge. The reasons are manifold, but one is prominent, namely poor vocabulary…

Background: There is increasing recognition of the contribution of morphological skills to the development of reading fluency. However, theoretical models and recent research raise questions about how different language skills influence reading development. Methods: The present study was designed to follow the reading development of a large sample…

Background: The lexical quality hypothesis proposes that successful reading comprehension requires high quality lexical representations, which allow for efficient retrieval. These retrieval operations have however not been specified. Methods: We investigated the contribution of semantic retrieval to reading comprehension in 119 Dutch children in…

Good and poor comprehenders exhibit different profiles of cognitive abilities, despite comparable decoding skills. Recent work suggests that executive functions, particularly cognitive flexibility, may underlie poor comprehenders' difficulties in childhood and adulthood. However, metalinguistic skills that enable readers to reflect on various…

This study aimed to determine whether the reading skills of third-grade schoolchildren are associated with their preferences for semantic, phonological, and shape competitors (images or printed words) after being exposed to a spoken critical word. Two groups of children participated: skilled readers and less-skilled readers. Through a…

Background: Connectives, such as "because" or "although," explicitly indicate how to semantically link individual segments of a text. Knowledge of connectives has been shown to significantly contribute to variance explanation in comprehension of English and Dutch texts, particularly amongst monolingual students and students…

Successful anaphor comprehension in reading is related to the explicitness of the antecedent--anaphor relation. It mirrors one of the purposes of textual enhancement (TE), which is that it raises learners' awareness of linguistic forms by enhancing the salience of input. Therefore, learners notice the enhanced form and discover the rule or…

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)…

There are many established reading strategy training programmes, which explicitly teach strategic and meta-cognitive knowledge to improve reading comprehension. Although instruction in strategy knowledge leads to improvements in meta-cognitive skills, the effects do not always transfer to reading comprehension. Therefore, to investigate…

This study compared orthographic and semantic aspects of word learning in children who differed in reading comprehension skill. Poor comprehenders and controls matched for age (9-10 years), nonverbal ability and decoding skill were trained to pronounce 20 visually presented nonwords, 10 in a consistent way and 10 in an inconsistent way. They then…

Details a study showing that for young children, proactive semantic cues were the most helpful in reading. Reveals also that the children made miscues displaying semantic associations across cue types. (FL)