Knowing how to provide effective literacy instruction is important for all educators, but it is critically important for urban educators. This article is built on the assumption that deepening urban educators' understanding of the reading process will better equip them to facilitate students' reading development, and to diagnose and intervene if…

Learning to read in any language requires learning to map among print, sound and meaning. Writing systems differ in a number of factors that influence both the ease and the rate with which reading skill can be acquired, as well as the eventual division of labor between phonological and semantic processes. Further, developmental reading disability…

We describe a multiple-route model of reading development in which coarse-grained orthographic processing plays a key role in optimizing access to semantics via whole-word orthographic representations. This forms part of the direct orthographic route that gradually replaces phonological recoding during the initial phases of reading acquisition.…

Students must be able to consciously use their knowledge of phonology, orthography, morphology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics to successfully read and write. Difficulties in the conscious awareness of 1 or more of these 6 linguistic knowledge components may lead to reading and writing deficits. In this article, we present a componential model…

Purpose: This study investigated the network of brain regions involved in overt production of vowels, monosyllables, and bisyllables to test hypotheses derived from the Directions Into Velocities of Articulators (DIVA) model of speech production (Guenther, Ghosh, & Tourville, 2006). The DIVA model predicts left lateralized activity in inferior…

Metonymic verbs like "start" or "enjoy" often occur with artifact-denoting complements (e.g., "The artist started the picture") although semantically they require event-denoting complements (e.g., "The artist started painting the picture"). In case of artifact-denoting objects, the complement is assumed to be type shifted (or "coerced") into an…

According to the Lexical Restructuring Model (Metsala & Walley, 1998), children move from holistic representations of words, to syllabic representations, and finally to phonemic representations through a restructuring process driven by their developing lexical base. In contrast, the psycholinguistic grain size theory put forth by Ziegler and…

Assessed semantic priming for category coordinates and function-related words in children with good or poor reading comprehension, matched for decoding skill. Found that both groups showed priming for function-related words, but poor comprehenders showed priming for category coordinates only if the pairs shared high-association strength. Good…

Purpose: There is a substantial minority of children for whom lexical retrieval problems impede the normal pattern of language development and use. These problems include accurately producing the correct word even when the word's meaning is understood. Such problems are often referred to as "word-finding difficulties" (WFDs). This article examines…