In this essay, I outline some of the essential ingredients of a universal theory of reading acquisition, one that seeks to highlight commonalities while embracing the global diversity of languages, writing systems, and cultures. I begin by stressing the need to consider insights from multiple disciplines including neurobiology, cognitive science,…

Individual differences in working memory (WM) influence reading skills. We aim to identify how different domains of WM explain reading performance, and how this association changes with age and reading expertise. Hungarian children from first to sixth grade took part in our study. The decoding skills of all children were assessed with 1-min word…

The present study examined how argument type (science based vs. personal case based), belief consistency (belief consistent vs. inconsistent) and reading goals (read to evaluate vs. read to learn) influence comprehension and trustworthiness evaluations for claim-conflicting multiple texts. Undergraduates read four conflicting texts about the…

With only about a third of students in US public schools achieving the NAEP Proficient level, many educators believe students are not getting enough reading practice. However, how much reading practice is enough? This study quantifies the relationship between the amount of book reading and the expected number of words learned. We collected 45…

Spreading out study opportunities over time improves the retention of verbal material compared to consecutive study, yet little is known about the influence of temporal spacing on orthographic learning specifically. The current study addressed four questions: (1) do readers' eye movements during orthographic learning differ under spaced and massed…

Recent research on the use of eye movements to predict performance on reading comprehension tasks suggests that while eye movements may be used to measure comprehension, the relationship between eye-movement behavior and comprehension is influenced by differences in task demands between comprehension measures. In this study, we examined the…

Studies on the relation between children's reading motivation and early developmental stages of reading competence are rare and have neglected on-line measures of reading skill (e.g., eye movements indicating word decoding). For this reason, we investigated the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation on the efficiency of reading…

A recent article in this journal claims that the simple view of reading represents a long-outdated account of what underlies the ability to read. Its authors argue that if teachers are to be better informed about what is known about reading then the simple view must be replaced by a more current model, one that captures the substantial progress…

General academic words are those which are typically learned through exposure to school texts and occur across disciplines. We examined academic vocabulary assessment data from a group of English-speaking middle school students (N = 1,747). We tested how word frequency, complexity, proximity, polysemy, and diversity related to students' knowledge…

To learn to read, the brain must repurpose neural systems for oral language and visual processing to mediate written language. We begin with a description of computational models for how alphabetic written language is processed. Next, we explain the roles of a dorsal sublexical system in the brain that relates print and speech, a ventral lexical…

Despite the common and growing use of and instruction on digital reading in schools, the ways in which reading comprehension may operate differently in paper and online environments are still underexplored. Using publicly available national datasets, we explore similarities and differences in how varied comprehension processes relate to each other…

This article highlights a Cultural Sustenance View of Reading (CSVR), a complex reader model illuminated by vivid findings from an eight-year collaborative classroom-based study and extensive reviews of cognitive and sociocultural research. Within the CSVR, reading is conceptualized as being shaped by a readers' culturally and linguistically…

Children's experiences in preschool and kindergarten influence their future literacy learning. Although emergent literacy has traditionally been supported by play-based experiences, there has been a decline in play opportunities in recent years. Media publications citing the science of reading have called for more focus on systematic, direct…

In this commentary, the author explores the tension between almost 30 years of work that has embraced increasingly complex conceptions of digital reading and recent studies that risk oversimplifying digital reading as a singular entity analogous with reading text on a screen. The author begins by tracing a line of theoretical and empirical work…

Reading literacy is a multidimensional construct in terms of text and reading processes. Much research has examined the divisibility of the processes underlying reading, but they have treated the rest of the construct as unitary. This study extends the examination of dimensionality to a neglected area in literacy studies. It tests reading models…