The Conference at the University of Oviedo, Spain, within the 44th Annual Meeting of the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities, was an excellent opportunity to share knowledge, explore perspectives and reflect on the study of neurodevelopmental disorders in Europe and elsewhere in the world. The William M. Cruickshank…

In recent years, stronger literacy development has emerged as a critically important issue in Arabic speaking nations. Results of international assessments indicate that most of the participating Arab countries are near the bottom of achievement levels. Additionally, recent studies indicate the prevalence rate of reading disability ranges from…

Word learning is critical for the development of reading and language comprehension skills. Although previous studies have indicated that word learning is compromised in children with reading disability (RD) or developmental language disorder (DLD), it is less clear how word learning difficulties manifest in children with comorbid RD and DLD.…

We propose a review of the literature of the studies investigating reading acquisition in intellectual deficiency (ID), with particular focus on the explanatory factors for reading difficulties. Indeed, we explore the role of intellectual efficiency, perceptual abilities, oral language development, phonological processing and memory. The study of…

The purpose of this follow-up study was to determine the specific contribution of phonological processing abilities, including phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN) and verbal short-term memory (VSTM), as well as visual perception (VP), in word reading accuracy. A sample of 62 native Arabic speaking children from Grade 1…

The Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, 2nd Edition (CTOPP-2; Wagner et al., 2013) is commonly used in k-12 public schools to assess basic cognitive processing skills foundational for reading achievement. Psychometric support for its use with dual language learners (DLLs), a group representing over 10% of the school-aged population in…

A key to reducing reading difficulty, particularly for children living in poverty, is to provide high quality, explicit, and well-planned instruction from the start of a child's school career. Preschools that provide quality language, literacy, and content instruction have produced promising positive effects on children's later academic…

Purpose: To assess strengths and weaknesses of the reading level (RL) match approach and its potential to generate insights regarding the cognitive foundations of reading ability and disability. Method: We applied RL-match design to a sample of 2nd-6th graders reading a consistent orthography, Russian, using an "extreme phenotype"…

We investigated how struggling adult readers make use of sentence context to facilitate word processing when comprehending spoken language, conditions under which print decoding is not a barrier to comprehension. Stimuli were strongly and weakly constraining sentences (as measured by cloze probability), which ended with the most expected word…

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…

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated multimodal (visual and auditory) semantic and unimodal (visual only) phonological processing in reading disabled (RD) adolescents and non-impaired (NI) control participants. We found reduced activation for RD relative to NI in a number of left-hemisphere reading-related areas across all…

The results of Fast ForWord® training on English decoding-related skills were examined. Finnish fifth-grade students were identified as having reading fluency problems and poor skills in English as a foreign language learned at school and were randomly assigned to either a training group (TRG) or a control group. The TRG ("n"?=?13)…

The aim of this study was to determine if phonological processing deficits in specific reading disability (SRD) and specific language impairment (SLI) are the same or different. In four separate analyses, a different combination of reading and spoken language measures was used to divide 73 children into three subgroups: poor readers with average…

The authors investigated past-tense morphology problems in children with dyslexia compared to those classically observed in children with oral language impairment (LI). Children were tested on a past-tense elicitation task involving regulars ("look-looked"), irregulars ("take-took"), and nonwords ("murn-murned").…

The present study focuses on examining the hypothesis that auditory temporal perception deficit is a basic cause for reading disabilities among dyslexics. This hypothesis maintains that reading impairment is caused by a fundamental perceptual deficit in processing rapid auditory or visual stimuli. Since the auditory perception involves a number of…