The opaque English orthography complicates learning to read, as irregular words, such as the word "pint," cannot be Addread accurately by decoding. Studies with first language (L1) English children show that vocabulary facilitates word reading, especially in the case of irregular words. It is unclear whether this influence of vocabulary…

Research reveals that although the effect of diacritics--the symbols that tell the reader how to pronounce a letter--on reading and reading comprehension was examined in a series of studies, the influence of diacritics on listening comprehension, especially in the Arabic orthography, was not examined. Therefore, this study attempted to examine…

This study investigates the English spelling of students in grades 2 through 8 in Mainland China. A review of spelling and cross-linguistic research in spelling is presented. The orthographic development of 273 students was assessed "with validated spelling inventories" (Sterbinsky, 2007) to sample developmental features across three…

The purpose of the current study was to determine relationships between orthographic and morphological awareness of academic words and achievement across content areas. Participants (n = 256), diverse seventh and eighth graders, took three word knowledge measures; two standardized achievement measures were used as outcomes. Orthographic awareness…

This study investigated whether German learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) acquire additional recoding strategies that they do not need for recoding in the consistent German orthography. Based on the psycholinguistic grain size theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) we expected students with little experience in EFL to use the same…

A few studies suggest that gifted children with dyslexia have better literacy skills than averagely intelligent children with dyslexia. This finding aligns with the hypothesis that giftedness-related factors provide compensation for poor reading. The present study investigated whether, as in the native language (NL), the level of foreign language…

Understanding academic vocabulary is essential to student success in school. Use of academic vocabulary words in writing is considered one of the strongest measures of how well a reader understands a given word. In theory, willingness to use academic vocabulary in writing indicates the complexity of acquiring representations of the word's…

Children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) often struggle with spelling, which can have a negative effect on their written expression. Recent research has shown that linguistic analyses of spelling errors can be used to identify areas of need and guide remediation for spelling success. However, this research has not been conducted with…

A conceptualization of reading as an interaction of constrained and unconstrained skills formed the theoretical basis for this correlational analysis of adolescents' orthographic knowledge. We hypothesized that orthographic development (as measured by spelling ability) would serve as a link between constrained and unconstrained reading skills in…

We present the results of an empirical test of the hypothesis that transfer of orthographic processing to reading occurs when the scripts under acquisition are written with the same unit (specifically, the same alphabet). We tested 97 Spanish-English bilingual children in Grades 4 and 7. We measured mother's education level, verbal and nonverbal…

The present study investigates differences in the word-reading process between individuals reading in a deep (unpointed Hebrew) and a shallow orthography (Turkish). The participants were 120 students evenly and randomly recruited from three levels of education (primary = 3rd-4th graders; middle = 6th-7th graders; high = 9th-10th graders). The…

This study aims to enhance understanding of the factors underlying variance in the reading comprehension skills of prelingually deaf individuals. Participants were 213 sixth through tenth graders with prelingual deafness recruited from four orthographic backgrounds (Hebrew, Arabic, English, and German) and allocated to three distinct reading…

This study examined syntactic comprehension in French children with dyslexia in both listening and reading. In the first syntactic comprehension task, a partial version of the Epreuve de Comprehension syntaxico-semantique (ECOSSE test; French adaptation of Bishop's test for receptive grammar test) children with dyslexia performed at a lower level…

Purpose: A mixed-methods approach, evaluating triple word-form theory, was used to describe linguistic patterns of misspellings. Method: Spelling errors were taken from narrative and expository writing samples provided by 888 typically developing students in Grades 1-9. Errors were coded by category (phonological, orthographic, and morphological)…

This study examined the difference between less-skilled and skilled L1 Slovene English as foreign language (EFL) students in foreign language (L2) fluency and L2 orthographic skills; 93 less-skilled Grade 7 L1 Slovene students and 102 skilled Grade 7 L1 Slovene students participated in the study. The results showed that skilled readers performed…