Children's idiom comprehension is an important aspect of language development. Idioms have both literal and figurative meanings, and there are often great differences between literal meaning and figurative meaning, which brings great difficulties to children's accurate understanding of idioms. As a kind of underlying language ability,…

This study investigated the construct of paired associate learning (PAL) and its associations with Chinese word writing in kindergarten children. A total of 188 Chinese children (95 boys, mean age = 5.65 years; SD = 0.34) from [Xi'an], Mainland China in the third year of kindergarten participated in this study. Children were assessed on measures…

The present study examines the visual attention span deficit hypothesis in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Twenty-five Cantonese-speaking Chinese dyslexic children (DD group) were compared with 25 chronological-age-matched (CA) controls and another 25 reading-level-matched (RL) controls on their performance in visual attention span, reading, and…

A growing body of cross-linguistic research has suggested that morphological awareness plays a key role in both L1 and L2 word reading among bilingual readers. However, little is known about the interaction and development of L1 and L2 morphological awareness in relation to word reading. We addressed this issue by evaluating the unique…

The present study examined the relations of maternal literate support instructions during parent--child joint writing to children's word reading and writing across 1 year among 95 4- and 5-year-old children from Korea. The whole episode of mothers individually teaching their children how to write words was videotaped, and a Korean scale of…

Cunningham and Stanovich reported a longitudinal investigation over 10 years that examined the unique influence of exposure to print in explaining individual differences on various measures of reading achievement and declarative (general) knowledge. The present study replicated their investigation with a larger number of participants and…

The present study utilized a latent variable modeling approach to examine the Simple View of Reading in a sample of students from 3rd, 7th, and 10th grades (N = 215, 188, and 180, respectively). Latent interaction modeling and other latent variable models were employed to investigate (a) the functional form of the relationship between decoding and…

In the present study, maternal Pinyin mediation and its relations with young Chinese children's word reading and word writing development were explored. At time 1, 43 Mainland Chinese children and their mothers were videotaped on a task in which children were asked to write 12 words in Pinyin (a phonological coding system used in Mainland China as…

Across languages, children with developmental dyslexia are known to have impaired lexical phonological representations. Here, we explore associations between learning new phonological representations, phonological awareness, and sensitivity to amplitude envelope onsets (rise time). We show that individual differences in learning novel phonological…

Attentional control was investigated as a possible third component of reading comprehension, along with decoding and language comprehension, within the Simple View of reading (Gough & Tunmer "RASE: Remedial and Special Education" 7:6-10, 1986; Hoover & Gough "Reading and Writing" 2:127-160, 1990). Attentional control is the ability to suppress…

Learning can be considered a function of synthesis in which both cognitive functioning and the domain of affectivity convey. The aim of the present study was to investigate how specific literacy skills, i.e., reading and writing, relate to two main dimensions of negative affectivity, i.e., anxiety and depression. Study 1 was conducted on third…

States that 43 adolescents diagnosed as dyslexic/reading disabled had markedly lower scores on the WISC-III than on the earlier WISC-R. Reports that only 2 subjects had scores above the 25th percentile. Discusses the impact of lower WISC-III IQs on guidelines for classification of students as learning disabled. (PA)

This study examined the student-level and instruction-level predictors of narrative writing fluency and quality. Participants included 120 third-grade students from 13 classrooms. Student predictors included measures of reading, handwriting, spelling, IQ, grammatical understanding, and gender. Instructional predictors focused on the amount of time…

Investigates whether differences in reading performance between poor readers and normal readers could be better explained by phonological recoding deficiencies than IQ. Examines whether students with reading disabilities would have more difficulties than normal readers. Finds that there were differences between Spanish children who were normal…

Reports the effects of a highly structured individually administered remedial teaching program for children with reading difficulties. Argues that the reading accuracy and phonological awareness results are in keeping with the phonological-core variable-difference model of reading disability. Finds no obvious benefit in using IQ to select children…