The goal of this study was to examine the relation of morphological skills with reading fluency in 2nd grade Greek-speaking children and if phonological awareness and vocabulary mediate their relation. The sample consisted of 105 2nd grade Greek-speaking students (46 males; Mage = 7.83 years, SD = 3.31). Morphological awareness was assessed with…

Pauses when reading aloud play an essential role in reading and listening comprehension (for a review: Godde et al., 2020). Among the various types of pauses, breathing pauses during oral reading are particularly important. Their placement, frequency and duration tell us about breath and voice coordination as well as articulatory planning. These…

Several cross-linguistic studies found that oral reading prosody (i.e., prosodic variations in reading aloud) correlates with reading comprehension. As an extension, the present study aimed to examine the relationship between oral reading prosody and beyond word-level reading abilities in tone languages like Mandarin. One hundred and nine…

Students with language-based learning disabilities (LBLD) can face elevated socio-emotional well-being challenges in addition to literacy challenges. We examined the prevalence of risk and resilience factors among adolescents with LBLD (N = 93), ages 16-18, and the association with reading performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were…

Derivational suffixes are known to play a crucial role in assigning stress to multi-syllabic words among native English speakers. However, it is unclear whether second language (L2) learners of English can effectively use derivational suffixes as stress cues in written words. To address this gap, we studied if native Chinese-speaking adults…

The purpose of this study was to investigate if a group of sixth-grade low achievement language minority (LM) students' reading skills could be improved by an intervention designed to train reading fluency, a critical component of reading development, defined as integrating speed and accuracy (reading rate) as well as prosody. The study included…

Individual differences in reading performance between children appear from the onset of literacy acquisition. One possible explanation for this variability is the influence of inhibition in reading ability, a topic that has received very little research attention. Nevertheless, children often make guessing errors characterized by replacing a word…

The present work reviews the current knowledge of the development of reading prosody, or reading aloud with expression, in young children. Prosody comprises the variables of timing, phrasing, emphasis and intonation that speakers use to convey meaning. We detail the subjective rating scales proposed as a means of assessing performance in young…

We examined the relations between mothers' reading skills, home literacy environment (HLE), and children's emergent literacy skills and word reading and whether their relations vary across urban and rural contexts in China. Four hundred third-year kindergarten Chinese children (M[subscript age] = 74.50 ± 3.77 months) were recruited from Jining (N…

The present study examined the components of oral reading fluency (ORF) via various indices and their relationships with comprehension and learner-perceived difficulty of oral reading among Chinese second language (L2) learners. One hundred participants read aloud paragraphs, completed the comprehension test, and rated the difficulty of the oral…

We tested the effects of diglossia and orthography on reading in Arabic, manipulating reading in Spoken Arabic (SA), using Arabizi, in which it is written using Latin letters on computers/phones, and the two forms of the conventional written form Modern Standard Arabic (MSA): vowelled (shallow) and unvowelled (deep). 77 skilled readers in 8th…

Many children living in linguistically diverse low- and middle-income countries learn to read and write in multiple languages. Recent research provides implications for effective reading instruction with multilingual learners (e.g., Hall et al. in New Dir Child Adolesc Dev 166:145-189, 2019). However, there is limited empirical evidence on…

There is no obvious boundary information in Chinese reading. It has been shown that the introduction of word boundary information presented with alternating colors without changing the text distribution could significantly improve the reading speed of Chinese children in grade 2 (Perea and Wang in Mem Cognit 45(7):1160-1170, 2017.…

Effects of semantic versus syntactic constraints on resolution of Hebrew heterophonic-homographic words were examined at three reading skill levels. Fourth-and sixth-grade students and a group of adults read aloud sentences containing two types of heterophonic-homographs: noun-noun (e.g., BYCH [Hebrew characters] is read as beitsa 'egg' and bitsa…

Children can teach themselves new words via the process of independent text reading--previous studies on self-teaching heavily focused on learning to read in a first language (L1). Limited work to date has been devoted to second language learning (L2). The present study aimed to fill this gap by investigating self-teaching among English Language…