Before formal instruction, preschoolers represent words in print in various degrees of conventionality. Unlicensed letters are letters that have no connection to the word that the child is aiming to write; they are neither licensed by phoneme-grapheme rules nor by orthographical representations in the mental lexicon. In the current paper, we…

The relative importance of phonological versus morphological processes in reading varies depending on the writing system's orthographic consistency and morphological complexity. This study investigated the interplay between phonology and morphology in Hebrew reading acquisition, a language offering a unique opportunity for such examination with…

Organisational signals and sources can be considered metatextual cues that guide the processing of the discourse. Organisational signals encourage readers to use the structure strategy, while source information reveals the epistemic and formal properties of texts. This study addressed three gaps in prior research about these topics: (1) whether…

Pauses when reading aloud play an essential role in reading and listening comprehension (for a review: Godde et al., 2020). Among the various types of pauses, breathing pauses during oral reading are particularly important. Their placement, frequency and duration tell us about breath and voice coordination as well as articulatory planning. These…

There is growing theoretical and empirical consensus for a role of awareness of suprasegmental phonology, also known as prosody, or the rhythmic elements of speech, in reading comprehension. Here we explore a potential mechanism by which this relation functions: awareness of how punctuation reflects prosody, for instance appreciating that a period…

We assessed the relationship between word-to-text-integration (WTI) and reading comprehension in 7th grade students (n = 441) learning English as a second language (L2). The students performed a self-paced WTI reading task in Fall (T1) and Spring (T2), consisting of three text manipulation types (anaphora resolution, argument overlap, anomaly…

Despite the growing body of research on foreign language reading anxiety, there is still a dearth of comprehensive meta-analysis regarding the effect sizes of these studies. To fill the gap, this study meta-analyzed the overall average correlation between foreign language reading anxiety and its correlates among 9785 participants: two…

Previous research has demonstrated conflicting findings concerning orthographic access in older age. The current study examines whether older adults rely more heavily on stored knowledge while spelling, through testing of word concreteness. Forty-one younger (age 20-29), 41 middle age (age 45-55), and 40 healthy older adults (age 70-80) spelled 60…

Grammatical awareness of syntax and morphology is important in children's literacy development for both reading and writing. Hebrew, a language with rich inflectional morphology, marks nouns for plural number in conjunction with gender. Hebrew attributive adjectives agree with noun number and gender in the same noun phrase, while predicative…

Because of its regularity, it is relatively easy to learn to read and spell in Finnish. However, a specific hurdle in spelling acquisition seems to be the doubling of consonant letters. In this study on consonant letter doubling spelling in Finnish children (91 Grade 1 and 191 Grade 2 children), we asked two questions. First, are items with double…

There has been a significant volume of research studying the effect of individuals' motivation on reading comprehension. The findings of previous research have demonstrated both the direct contribution of motivation to comprehension and its indirect influence through mediating effects of reading amount and strategy use. The effect of the linkage…

Working memory has been proposed to account for the differential rates in progress young children make in writing. One crucial aspect of learning to write is the encoding (i.e., integration) and retrieval of the correct phoneme-grapheme pairings, known as binding. In addition to executive functions, binding is regarded as central to the concept of…

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)…

The role of parental literacy skills in cross-linguistic transfer, the phenomenon of the sharing of skills and competence from one language to another, is under-researched. The present study tested 147 Hong Kong Chinese children and their parents (76 boys; mean age = 7.16). Parental literacy skills significantly explained children's reading and…

Phonological awareness has been found to be an important skill underpinning reading development in several alphabetic languages. However, the development of phonological awareness and its relationship to reading development can be influenced by the nature of the language under investigation. While understanding this relationship in Thai language…