This study investigated how word and child characteristics affect children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words. Participants were fourth- and fifth-graders representing native English speakers (NE) and bilingual learners with fluent English proficiency (FEP) and designated English Learners (EL). Students were taught the meanings of a…

We examined the relationship between inference making, vocabulary knowledge, and verbal working memory on children's reading comprehension in 62 6th graders (aged 12). The effect of vocabulary knowledge on reading comprehension was predicted to be partly mediated by inference making for two reasons: Inference making often taps the semantic…

Working memory is considered a well-established predictor of individual variation in reading comprehension in children and adults. However, how storage and processing capacities of working memory in both the phonological and semantic domain relate to reading comprehension is still unclear. In the current study, we investigated the contribution of…

A longitudinal study analyzed (a) which lower- and higher-level semantic components uniquely predicted listening text comprehension and (b) the nature of the relation (i.e., direct and indirect) between the predictors and listening text comprehension in preschoolers. One-hundred and fifty-two children participated in the present study (68 females;…

The mental lexicon plays a central role in reading comprehension (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). It encompasses the number of lexical entries in spoken and written language (vocabulary breadth), the semantic quality of these entries (vocabulary depth), and the connection strength between lexical representations (semantic relatedness); as such, it…

The study investigated the role of word-level and verbal skills in writing quality of learners who spoke English as a first (L1) and second (L2) language. One hundred and sixty-eight L1 and L2 learners (M = 115.38 months, SD = 3.57 months) participated in the study. All testing was conducted in English. There was a statistically significant L1…