Phonological representations are important for reading. In the current work, we examine the relationship between speech-perceptual memory encoding and consolidation to reading ability in skilled adult readers. Seventy-three young adults (age 18-24) were first tested in their word and nonword reading ability, and then trained in the late evening to…

Increasing engagement may enable struggling readers to catch up with their peers. This study examined the impact of using multisensory strategies with Elkonin boxes to teach decodable words to first grade students. The study found that student interest impacted engagement, particularly when it was a combination of auditory, tactile, and visual.…

The present study employed a think-aloud method to explore the origin of a centrality deficit (i.e., poor recall of central ideas) found in poor comprehenders (PC). Moreover, utilizing the diverse think-aloud responses, we examined the overall quality of text processing employed by PC during reading, in order to shed more light on the cognitive…

In this experiment, we examined whether beginning readers benefit more from grapheme-phoneme decoding (GPD) than from whole-syllable decoding (WSD) instruction in learning to read and write words. Sixty Brazilian Portuguese-speaking first graders (M age = 6 years 1 month) who knew letter names but could not read or write words were randomly…

The author reviews theory and research by Ehri and her colleagues to document how a scientific approach has been applied over the years to conduct controlled studies whose findings reveal how beginners learn to read words in and out of text. Words may be read by decoding letters into blended sounds or by predicting words from context, but the way…

A hallmark of skilled reading is recognizing written words automatically from memory by sight. How beginning readers attain this skill is explained. They must acquire foundational knowledge, including phonemic segmentation, grapheme-phoneme knowledge, decoding, and spelling skills. When these skills are applied, spellings of words become bonded to…

The purpose of this case series was to explore whether adults who did not have the opportunity to acquire reading skills during childhood are able to do so rapidly if trained with an adequate literacy program. After 14 weeks of training with a new, optimized, literacy course based on cognitive research, six out of eight participants became able to…

Skilled reading involves rapid and automatic word recognition. Through a self-teaching process, phonological decoding during reading is thought to establish the word-specific representations in memory that support efficient word reading. Much is known about orthographic learning during reading; less is understood about this process during…

Listening comprehension and word decoding are the two major determinants of the development of reading comprehension. The relative importance of different language skills for the development of listening and reading comprehension remains unclear. In this 5-year longitudinal study, starting at age 7.5 years (n = 198), it was found that the shared…

An experiment examined orthographic facilitation of vocabulary learning, that is, whether showing students spellings of novel words during learning helps them remember the words when spellings are no longer present. The purpose was to determine whether having students decode the spellings of vocabulary words improves word learning over passive…

Learning to read English is more difficult than in most other alphabetic languages. It sometimes seems there are not reliable rules for linking letters with sounds. Teaching students all of the letter patterns they may find in texts is no simple task. Students struggle processing the sounds in words, so even words with simple spellings are…

Purpose: We investigated the cognitive and linguistic processes that underlie reading in Arabic in relation to a well-defined theoretical framework of reading and the factors that underlie reading. Method: The sample was 201 (101 boys, 100 girls) 3rd-grade Arabic-speaking children. Children were administered measures of Vocabulary, Phonological…

This study identified the effectiveness of using a phonological awareness-based instructional program in developing the phonetic sequential-memorization skill among students with learning disabilities in the Aseer region. The study sample consisted of forty students from the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh grades, selected from schools in…

This study examines students' exposure to print, vocabulary and decoding as predictors of spelling skills. Participants were 42 college students (Mean age 22.5, SD = 7.87; 31 females and 11 males). Hierarchical regression analyses showed that most of the variance in spelling was explained by vocabulary knowledge. When vocabulary was entered first…

This study investigated the development of working memory ability (measured by tasks assessing all four working memory components) from the end of kindergarten to the end of first grade--the first year reading is taught in school--and the relationship between working memory abilities in kindergarten and first grade and reading skills in first…