Purpose: When breakdowns in communication occur, children may request a repair to increase understanding of the message. Unrepaired communication breakdowns may cause confusions, limit conversational exchanges, and restrict children's learning opportunities. Relatively little is known regarding the conditions under which children produce repair…

This study tested whether individuals with autism spectrum conditions (n = 23) show enhanced discrimination of acoustic differences that signal a linguistic contrast (i.e., /g/ versus /k/ as in "goat" and "coat") and whether they process such differences in a less categorical fashion as compared with 23 IQ-matched typically…

Genetic liability to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can be expressed in unaffected relatives through subclinical, genetically meaningful traits, or endophenotypes. This study aimed to identify developmental endophenotypes in parents of individuals with ASD by examining parents' childhood academic development over the school-age period. A cohort of…

Background: Previous research found that pre-teenage ability to derive arbitrary "same," "opposite," "more," and "less" relations correlated with measured intelligence quotient (IQ) and that training this "derived relational responding" (DRR) skill produced substantial IQ rises. Aims: This study…

The present study examined the construct and predictive validity of a dynamic test of decoding. In theory, a dynamic test provides a direct measure of potential for learning. In this study, children were taught 3 novel letters and how to blend the sounds of those into new words, then they were tested on different words comprising the 3 letters.…

Can young students' early reading abilities in their first language (L1) predict later literacy development in a second language (L2)? The cross-language relationships between Chinese (L1) and English (L2) among 87 Hong Kong students were explored in a longitudinal study. Chinese word-reading fluency, Chinese rapid digit naming, and Chinese rhyme…

We examined the cross-lagged relations between children's task-avoidant behavior and their performance in reading and spelling in Chinese. Eighty Grade 2 and 103 Grade 4 Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese children were assessed on measures of nonverbal IQ, task value, reading accuracy, fluency, and spelling. A year later, the children were reassessed on…

Difficulties in phonological processing and reading that characterize developmental dyslexia have been suggested also to affect those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, it is not known to what extent various intervening factors, such as low intelligence quotient or age, explain the observed difficulties. In this study,…

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…

A total of 86 deaf children aged between 12 and 16 years were recruited from schools for the deaf, specialist units attached to a school, and mainstream schools. Approximately one-third used hearing aids, one-third had received a cochlear implant before 42 months, and one-third had been implanted later. The 3 subgroups were matched for age and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of using online modules to teach The Word Identification Strategy (Lenz, Schumaker, Deshler, & Beals, 2007) to elementary and middle school students with learning disabilities in reading. The five participants in this multiple probe across participants study were enrolled in an online…

The ability of working memory skills (measured by tasks assessing all four working memory components), IQ, language, phonological awareness, literacy, rapid naming, and speed of processing at 6 years of age, before reading was taught, to predict reading abilities (decoding, reading comprehension, and reading time) a year later was examined in 97…

This is a study of word decoding in adolescents with Down syndrome and in adolescents with Intellectual Deficits of unknown etiology. It was designed as a replication of studies of word decoding in English speaking and in Hebrew speaking adolescents with Williams syndrome ([0230] and [0235]). Participants' IQ was matched to IQ in the groups with…

Many schools across the United States and Canada are now implementing response-to-intervention (RTI) as a means to address the needs of students who struggle with reading, writing, or math by using dual discrepancy (i.e., low ability and little to no progress over time with targeted intervention programming) as a means to classify for learning…

Although the dominant approach posits that developmental dyslexia arises from deficits in systems that are exclusively linguistic in nature (i.e., phonological deficit theory), dyslexics show a variety of lower level deficits in sensory and attentional processing. Although their link to the reading disorder remains contentious, recent empirical…