The aim of this study is to examine the mechanisms used by deaf children with and without cochlear implants (CIs) to read sentences and the linguistic bases (vocabulary and syntax) underlying those reading mechanisms. Previous studies have shown that deaf persons read sentences using the key word strategy (KWS), which consists of identifying some…

Purpose: Pragmatic language difficulties have been documented as part of the FMR1 premutation phenotype, yet the interplay between these features in mothers and the language outcomes of their children with fragile X syndrome is unknown. This study aimed to determine whether pragmatic language difficulties in mothers with the "FMR1"…

The study investigated morphosyntactic abilities and semantic-pragmatic competence in 24 children with developmental dyslexia aged 7-12 years. Morphosyntactic abilities were investgated in a direct object clitic production task, semantic-pragmatic competence in a quantifier comprehension task. Children with dyslexia produced fewer clitics than…

This study looks at the relationship between L1 (Russian) attrition and L1 reading ability in Russian-English-speaking bilingual children. Ten Russian-English bilingual children and 10 adults participated in this study. Nine out of 10 children participants were born in the US and used L1 as their primary language of interaction within the family,…

Syntactic awareness has been linked to word reading and reading comprehension. The predictive power of two syntactic awareness tasks (grammatical correction, word-order correction) for both aspects of reading was explored in 8- and 10-year-olds. The relative contributions of vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory to each were assessed.…

We summarize some of the most important findings from research evaluating the hypothesized causes of specific reading disability ("dyslexia") over the past four decades. After outlining components of reading ability, we discuss manifest causes of reading difficulties, in terms of deficiencies in component reading skills that might lead to such…

Argues that the extent of a child's sense of story influences the child's prediction of syntax and comprehension. Suggests ways for teachers to encourage children to develop their sense of story. (RL)

This article reports a study in which fourth graders were tested on their recall of stories they had read. Thrity-two children, divided into two groups of 16 by reading ability, each read two passages and were scored for recall. The passages read were either the original versions of two stories, semantic rewrites (in which anaphoric elements,…

Sixty-five grade 5-6 children were tested on a verbal recall task involving material of varying semantic and syntactic content. There was no difference between best and poorest readers in their performance on random lists of words, but there were clear differences on meaningful sentences and on syntactically well-formed but semantically anomalous…