The purpose of this study was to explore the reading behavior of young proficient Chinese readers at preschool age. Especially, the roles of phonetic skill and Chinese Character recognition in reading comprehension were explored. 10 kindergartens were recruited to participate in the study. Subjects were 72-98 kindergarten children. Instruments…

Although language experience is a key factor in successful foreign language (FL) learning, many FL learners fail to achieve performance levels that were predicted on the basis of their FL experience. This retrospective study investigated early cognitive and linguistic correlates of learning English as a foreign language (FL) in a group of…

This study examined the relationships of 3 levels of reading fluency--the individual word, the syntactic unit, and the whole passage--to reading comprehension among 278 5th graders heterogeneous in reading ability. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that reading fluency at each level related uniquely to performance on a standardized reading…

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.…

A study investigated the reading comprehension of 34 college freshmen in relation to the presence of 20 syntactic elements of written language in their expository writing. Language samples included one silent reading comprehension test that identified "high" and "low" readers and two expository in-class themes, one developed…

Nassaji and Geva (1999) concluded that lower level processes, particularly efficiency in phonological and orthographic processing contributed significantly to individual differences in adult ESL reading. Moreover, they reported that speed of letter naming, while not directly associated with reading comprehension, was related to linguistic…

Research on reading has tried, and failed, to account for wide disparities in reading skill even among children taught by the same method. Why do some children learn to read easily and quickly while others, in the same classroom and taught by the same teacher, don't learn to read at all? In "Language Development and Learning to Read", Diane…