Background: Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children may experience difficulties in word decoding development. Aims: We aimed to compare and predict the incremental word decoding development in first grade in Dutch DHH and hearing children, as a function of kindergarten reading precursors. Methods and procedures: In this study, 25 DHH, and 41…

Children's word problem competence is a major determinant of their career prospects. Abstract word (AW) comprehension and equal sign knowledge (ESK) are considered the foundation of discourse comprehension and pre-algebra skills, respectively. However, the link between AW and ESK in relation to the meaningful agent representative information…

The objective for beginning writers is to learn how to generate alphabet-letters which are recognisable and easy to read. This study investigated the accuracy of Year 1 and 2 children's alphabet-letter-writing by evaluating their alphabet and orthographic knowledge, following evidence which identifies these skills as important for correctly…

Research on text comprehension in relation to the reading medium (paper or screen) has mainly involved undergraduate or high school students. To advance current knowledge on the effects of reading medium, this longitudinal study focused on beginner readers, specifically, the role of precursors in first graders' comprehension of narrative and…

To investigate the longitudinal effects of two domain-general cognitive abilities, namely verbal working memory and visual search skill, on Chinese reading comprehension. To evaluate whether decoding and linguistic comprehension mediate such effects. A total of 202 first-grade Chinese-speaking children from mainland China (M[subscript]age =…

This study compared the sentence hyperbole comprehension performance of Chinese poor readers with various levels of arithmetic proficiency. A total of 168 Chinese poor readers in Grade 1 were recruited, and their nonverbal intelligence, verbal working memory, Chinese receptive vocabulary, Chinese grammatical knowledge, character reading and…

We examined the cognitive predictors of early word reading skills in Japanese syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji. Eighty-three Japanese kindergarten children (M age = 75.6 months, SD = 3.4) were assessed on nonverbal IQ, vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological memory, morphological awareness, and…

The relationships between phonological awareness, rapid naming, short term verbal memory, letter knowledge, visual skills and word reading in kindergarten, and the predictive patterns from kindergarten to first grade were examined in 41 Chinese-Dutch bilingual children living in the Netherlands in both their first language (Chinese) and second…

An experiment examined orthographic facilitation of vocabulary learning, that is, whether showing students spellings of novel words during learning helps them remember the words when spellings are no longer present. The purpose was to determine whether having students decode the spellings of vocabulary words improves word learning over passive…

We investigated the extent to which working memory and behavioral attention predicted reading and listening comprehension in grades 1 through 3 and, whether their relative contributions differed by modality and grade. Separate grade samples (N = 370; ns = 125, 123, and 122 for grades 1, 2, and 3 respectively) completed multiple measures of word…

We examined the contribution of rapid automatized naming (RAN) components (articulation time, pause time, and pause time consistency) to reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling in a sample of 257 German children (139 boys, 118 girls; M[subscript age] = 5.60 years, SD = 0.31) followed from kindergarten to Grade 1. In kindergarten,…

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to examine whether young learners of varying reading and spelling performance, identified in Grade 2, can be distinguished retrospectively from kindergarten, based on their growth profiles in cognitive (planning, attention, working memory--WM) and linguistic (phonological--PA and naming speed--RAN)…

We examined the Direct and Indirect Effects model of Writing (DIEW), using longitudinal data from Korean-speaking beginning writers. DIEW posits hierarchical structural relations among component skills (e.g., transcription skills, higher order cognitive skills, oral language, motivation/affect, background knowledge) where lower level skills are…

The current study was designed to understand the development of comprehension monitoring among beginner readers from first to third grade, and to determine the extent to which first graders' comprehension monitoring predicts reading comprehension in grade three. Participants were 113 children (57% female) from four US states who were followed from…

We examined the role of different cognitive skills in word reading (accuracy and fluency) and spelling accuracy in syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji. Japanese Hiragana and Kanji are strikingly contrastive orthographies: Hiragana has consistent character-sound correspondences with a limited symbol set, whereas Kanji has inconsistent…