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 examined accuracy on syllable-final (coda) consonants in newly-learned English-like nonwords to determine whether school-aged bilingual children may be more vulnerable to making errors on English-only codas than their monolingual, English-speaking peers, even at a stage in development when phonological accuracy in productions of…

The purpose of this study was to explore the ways emergent bilingual first-graders draw on multiple linguistic resources during reading assessments and the participation of their Spanish-dominant parents in those assessments, as children engaged in English and Spanish retelling tasks. Informed by a translanguaging lens, sociopsycholinguistic and…

Background: Although a large body of research has investigated teachers' reading-related knowledge and associated pedagogical practices, comparatively little is known about these factors in parents. Therefore, the present study examined the association between parental reading-related knowledge and feedback during child-to-parent reading. Methods:…

Separating text into meaningful language chunks, as with visual-syntactic text formatting, helps readers to process text more easily and language learners to recognize grammar and syntax patterns more quickly. Evidence of this exists in studies on native and non-native English speakers. However, recent studies question the roll of VSTF in certain…

Cultural sensitivity and responsiveness are being advocated in reading assessments to reduce the impact of community speech patterns (CSP) on the accuracy of miscue analysis. This study, motivated by a high incidence of retention in 1st grade in a local school district, investigated whether CSP among students affected reading outcomes and…

In a study concerned with the function of test wiseness in competency testing and with the impact of question stem structure within a reading competency test, 43 fourth grade students and 38 sixth grade students were administered one form each of the experimental material. This material consisted of ten questions presented in the stylized language…

Traditionally, reading disabled children have been characterized as suffering a performance or process deficit that prevents them from acquiring the knowledge and skills underlying proficient reading and comprehension. Such explanations raise some logical problems. Process oriented theories do not adequately explain the specificity nor address the…

SOURCES OF INFORMATION FOR RESPONSES TO MULTIPLE-CHOICE ITEMS ON READING COMPREHENSION TESTS AND THE EFFECTS OF CONTENT WORDS AND FUNCTION WORDS IN SUPPLYING INFORMATION FOR THE CORRECT COMPLETION OF MULTIPLE-CHOICE ITEMS WERE STUDIED IN AN EXPERIMENT AT CAMPBELL COLLEGE. PARAGRAPHS WITH ACCOMPANYING MULTIPLE-CHOICE ITEMS SAMPLED FROM READING…

Five orders of approximation to normal English prose were constructed; 5th, 10th, 25th, 50th, and 100th plus. Five cloze tests were then constructed by inserting blanks for deleted words in 5 word segments (5th order), 10 word segments (10th), 25 word segments (25th), 50 word segments (50th), and 100 word segments of five different passages of…

The aim of the present study was to investigate idiom comprehension in school-age Italian children with different reading comprehension skills. According to our hypothesis, the level of a child's text comprehension skills should predict his/her ability to understand idiomatic meanings. Idiom comprehension in fact requires children to go beyond a…

This study explores the effect of information focus on the size of the unit decoded by a reader. Sixty students chosen at random from average reading groups in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade levels were studied. Each subject read orally 36 thematic sentence frames presented in random order. Each frame contained a point at which the visual display…