Purpose: There are many aspects of words that can influence our lexical processing, and the words we are exposed to influence our opportunities for language and reading development. The purpose of this study is to establish a more comprehensive understanding of the lexical challenges and opportunities students face. Method: We explore the latent…

The frequency and contextual predictability of words have a fundamental role in determining "where" and "when" the eyes move during reading in both alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages. However, surprising little is known about the how the influence of these variables develops, although this is important for understanding…

The goal of the paper was to investigate whether morphological units -- stems and suffixes -- influence orthographic processing by modulating visual attention demands to the task. Orthographic processing was measured with a visual one-back task requiring letters to be detected within pseudowords not including stems/suffixes, or containing real…

In this study, we examined the mechanism for the relationship between morphological awareness and Chinese character reading in a group of Hong Kong primary school children when they were in grade two (n = 176, mean age = 8.07) and grade three (n = 163, mean age = 9.02). The results showed that morphological awareness, morpheme family size and the…

Purpose: We investigated the roles of leisure reading and word reading ability in vocabulary and reading comprehension development in 598 adolescents at ages 10, 11, and 12 (285 girls, 313 boys). Method: Structural equation modeling was used to test whether word reading was associated with vocabulary and reading comprehension: a) directly; b)…

We examined the relations between working memory, emergent literacy skills (e.g., phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, rapid-automatized naming), word reading, and listening comprehension to online reading processes (eye movements), and their relations to reading comprehension. A total of 292 students were assessed on working memory and…

Previous research has generally focused on understanding individual variation in either on-line processing or off-line comprehension even though some theories explicitly link difficulty in processing to comprehension problems. The goal of the current study was to examine individual variation in performance both during on-line and off-line reading…

In this study, we investigated if children build a print-to-meaning connection via the semantic radical -- a mechanism we call "semantic decoding" -- and its interaction with phonological decoding in orthographic learning of Chinese compound characters. Ninety-two Grade 4 children were taught the pronunciations and meanings of 16…

This study investigated the association of timed visual processing tasks varying in levels of phonological processing with word reading. We tested 293 Chinese children on Cross Out, Visual Matching, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and Chinese character recognition across three to five years. Children's character recognition at ages 6 and 7…

In the present study, the frequency effect was examined specifically in text reading in developing and expert readers. Third graders, fifth graders, and expert readers read the same short text containing high- and low-frequency words while their eye movements were recorded. The frequency effect was observed in temporal and spatial measures of eye…

Previous research has revealed conflicting results with regard to the role of the magnocellular visual system in reading and dyslexia. In order to investigate this further, the present study examined the relationship between performance on two magnocellular tasks (temporal gap detection and coherent motion), reading rate (oral and silent), and…

We tested the theoretically driven hypotheses that children's orthographic and semantic learning are associated with their word reading and reading comprehension skills, even when orthographic and semantic knowledge are taken into account. A sample of 139 English-speaking Grade 3 children completed a learning task in which they read stories about…

Children struggle with the resolution of pronouns during reading, but little is known about the sources of their difficulties. We conducted a longitudinal eye tracking experiment with 70 children in the final years of primary school. The children read sentences with a contextual resolution preference in which gender was either an informative…

Word list reading fluency is theoretically expected to depend on single word reading speed. Yet the correlation between the two diminishes with increasing fluency, while fluency remains strongly correlated to serial digit naming. We hypothesized that multi-element sequence processing is an important component of fluency. We used confirmatory…

This functional magnetic resonance imaging study examined the neural correlates of coherence-break detection during reading in the context of a contradiction paradigm. Young adults (N = 31, ages 19-27) read short narratives (half contained a break in coherence) that were presented sentence by sentence in a self-paced, slow event-related design.…