Background: Prominent theories of reading make the prediction that individual differences in children's word learning capacity determine the pace of their acquisition of reading skill. Despite the developmental nature of some of these theories, most empirical research to date has explored the relation between word learning capacity and reading at…

Background: Oral language has long been acknowledged as a prominent influence on children's reading development. Here, we examine the intersecting contribution of two prominent aspects of oral language - phonology and morphology. We explore this interface by examining contributions from the two dimensions of phonology - phonemic and prosodic - of…

Background: This study examined how children's ability to understand what they read on screens is impacted by two specific digital features: hovering hyperlinks and scrolling. Methods: The participants were 75 English-speaking children (M = 9.90 years, SD = 0.90 years) in Grades 3 to 5 who participated in an online research study. Using a…

Background: To better understand the intricate science of reading development, both cognitive and affective factors must be taken into consideration. This developmental study aims to enrich the literature by exploring how reading motivation -- an affective factor -- contributes to reading comprehension in Chinese elementary schoolers, beyond…

Background: This paper investigates multiple antecedents of literacy in children, such as demographics, child reading behaviour, parent reading behaviour and family context. Methods: The study included a Romanian sample of 924 primary schoolers (Grades 1-4) and their parents; children and parents were tested with a standardised measure of…

Background: Rapid automatised naming (RAN) has been found to predict children's reading and arithmetic abilities. However, the underlying mechanisms for its involvement in the two abilities are not clear. This study examines how RAN shared variances with domain-general and domain-specific abilities in predicting reading and arithmetic in Chinese…

Background: We examine effects on oral reading fluency (defined as automatic word recognition and prosody) when phrase-cued text (defined as marking the phrase boundaries in text) is layered on to readers theatre, an evidence-based instructional format that includes multiple readings over a period of about 5 days as students practice and prepare…

Background: Whether lexical and sub-lexical orthographic skills relate to each other and to reading was investigated in French 3rd and 5th graders. Methods: Two homophone choice tasks were constructed (1) by manipulating the frequency of words sub-lexical features (choose the correct spelling in "boat" - "bacht" vs…

Background: The role of morphological awareness for literacy development is non-controversial, but it is likely to depend on the characteristics of a specific orthography. Previous studies analysing the role of morphological awareness are mainly based on English samples; thus, it is unclear how generalisable these results are. In the current…

Background: The National Education Policy of India in 2020 indicated a goal that all children will achieve foundational literacy by Grade 3 by 2025. In line with this, the Indian government sets a target of 30 to 35 correct words per minute (cwpm) at Grade 3. However, there are no supporting data for reading fluency targets in the Indian reading…

Background: "Screen inferiority" refers to a well-established phenomenon observed among adults and teenagers, wherein they demonstrate higher reading comprehension when reading from paper compared to screens. However, there is limited research focusing on readers in the initial stages of reading development. The current study aims to…

Educators and researchers agree that oral language is fundamental to students' reading acquisition. It is not clear how best to conceptualise oral language within models of reading -- as one's overall understanding of spoken language, or as individual skills, each with unique contributions to children's reading comprehension. In our longitudinal…

Objective: Our objective was to examine the role of semantics in the relation between syntactic awareness and contextual facilitation in word reading. Methods: Grade 3 children (N = 77) completed a syntactic awareness task in which we manipulated the possible reliance on semantic information. They also completed a task of word reading in isolation…

Background: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of Structured Word Inquiry (SWI; an orthography intervention with a focus on morphology and how morphology interrelates with phonology and etymology) and Simplicity intervention (a novel phonics intervention) on the reading and spelling skills of persistently poor Grade 3 readers.…

Background: In countries with German as an official language, children with German as a second language perform overall worse in school than their German native speaking peers. This particularly affects written language skills, which require advanced language knowledge. The reasons are manifold, but one is prominent, namely poor vocabulary…