The present study was conducted to explore how the relationships between reading comprehension constructs change according to word reading accuracy, as measured in a large convenience sample (n = 857) of school-aged students (Years 3-6) with reading difficulties. Multiple regression analyses containing interaction variables were conducted, to…

The two major determinants of reading comprehension are language comprehension and decoding, but prior studies of the development of reading comprehension from an early age show inconsistent results. To clarify these inconsistencies we report a 6-year longitudinal study (starting at Age 4 years) where we control for measurement error and track the…

Reading comprehension is a complex task which depends on a range of cognitive and linguistic processes. According to the Simple View of Reading, this complexity can be captured as the product of two sets of skills: decoding and linguistic comprehension. The Simple View explains variance in reading comprehension and provides a good framework to…

This study investigated the contribution of linguistic comprehension to the decoding skills of struggling readers. Participants were 36 children aged between eight and 12 years, all below average in decoding but differing in linguistic comprehension. The children read passages from the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability and their first 25 miscues…

This study investigated the response to class-wide phonological awareness and oral language teaching for 40 children who entered school with speech and language difficulties. A stepped wedge research design was adopted to compare the immediate impact of the 10-week teacher-led instruction. The progress of the children with speech and language…

Differing etiological explanations have been proposed to account for poor comprehenders' difficulties with reading comprehension, with some researchers emphasizing working memory deficits and others arguing for oral language weaknesses playing a key causal role. The authors contrasted these two theoretical accounts using data obtained from direct…

This study examined three processes crucial to reading comprehension ("semantic access", "integration", and "inhibition") to identify causes of comprehension impairment. Poor comprehenders were compared to chronological-age controls and vocabulary-age (VA) controls. When listening to homonym primes ("bank")…

This paper reports provisional Australian comparison data and scoring instructions for the "Test of Word Reading Efficiency" (TOWRE). The TOWRE is a popular reading fluency test used in reading research, classroom assessment and clinical practice. Approximate "norms" were obtained from children attending four primary schools in…

Children with hyperlexia display spontaneous superior word decoding ability before the age of five but impaired listening and reading comprehension. They have direct phonological processing of any given text with apparent ease and often well beyond their vocabulary usage. Though they can recognise and read words, words appear meaningless. As a…

This study investigated the hypothesis that the contributions of oral language comprehension ("C") and word recognition ("D") to reading comprehension ("R") in the simple view of reading (SVR) are not independent because a component of "C" (vocabulary knowledge) directly contributes to the variance in…

There is a growing literature demonstrating that speech rhythm sensitivity is related to children's reading development, independent of phonological awareness. However, the precise nature of this relationship is less well understood, and further research is warranted to investigate whether speech rhythm sensitivity predicts the different…

Background: The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA) (Neale, 1997) is widely used in education and research. It provides measures of reading accuracy (decoding) and comprehension, which are frequently interpreted separately. Aims: Three studies were conducted to investigate the degree to which the NARA measures could be separated. Samples:…

Background: In reading research, children with specific language impairment (SLI) have tended to be included in groups of children expected to have difficulties with both decoding and reading comprehension (generally poor readers). This is because generally children with specific language impairment display difficulties with phonology as well as…