This study investigates how individual-level factors contribute to classroom engagement variations of boys and girls across the elementary school years. Classroom engagement was assessed four times between the ages of 7 and 12 years in a large, representative population-based sample (N = 877) using latent growth modeling. Predictors included the…

Bilingual children often lag behind monolinguals on standardized measures of language acquisition, such as vocabulary tests. This bilingual lag could be related bilinguals' lesser experience with the target language relative to monolinguals. In this study, we predicted that sequential Mandarin-English bilinguals would perform worse than same-aged…

Purpose: The probability of a child reading a word correctly is influenced by both child skills and properties of the word. The purpose of this study was to investigate child-level skills (set for variability and vocabulary), word-level properties (concreteness), word structure (mono- vs polymorphemic), and interactions between these properties…

Connectives such as "because" and "but" are crucial for signaling coherence relations in discourse. They contribute to a better reading comprehension and, thus, academic performance. The aim of this article is to contribute to our understanding of connective development during teenage years by studying individual differences in…

Conjunctions facilitate text cohesion and comprehension by making explicit the logical relationships between ideas in written language. Conjunctions may be challenging for English language learners (ELLs) because of their novel, abstract, and text-connecting role. In this longitudinal study we aimed to clarify the connections among comprehension…

To date, cross-cultural studies on Theory of Mind (ToM) have predominantly focused on preschoolers. This study focuses on middle childhood, comparing two samples of mainland Chinese (n = 126) and Australian (n = 83) children aged between 5.5 and 12 years. Strange Stories, the most commonly used measure of ToM, was employed. The study aimed to…

We investigated the contribution of morphological awareness to university students' reading comprehension ability. Although there is considerable evidence that morphological awareness contributes to children's reading ability, there is much less evidence concerning adults; the few studies of adults have not controlled other known predictors of…

It is often claimed that child English L2 learners take up to seven years to attain English skills commensurate with those of monolingual peers; however, existing research is insufficient to know if this claim is valid for oral language abilities in particular. This study examined the lexical and morphological abilities of English L2 learners and…

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…

Bilingual children experience more variation in their language environment than monolingual children and this impacts their rate of language development with respect to monolinguals. How long it takes for bilingual children learning English as a second language (L2) to display similar abilities to monolingual age-peers has been estimated to be 4-6…

This study aims to investigate whether emotional and behavioral difficulties (EBD) differ between children with cochlear implants (CIs) or hearing aids (HAs), according to multi-informant ratings. Methods: A battery of psychological measures (e.g., Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA),…

Researchers have extensively documented how various statistical properties of words (e.g., word frequency) influence lexical processing. However, the impact of lexical variables on nonword decision-making performance is less clear. This gap is surprising, because a better specification of the mechanisms driving nonword responses may provide…

The Adult Basic Education (ABE) population consists of a wide range of abilities with needs that may be unique to this set of learners. The purpose of this study was to better understand the relative contributions of phonological decoding and morphological awareness to spelling, vocabulary, and comprehension across a sample of ABE students. In…

Models of irregular word reading that take into account both child- and word-level predictors have not been evaluated in typically developing children and children with reading difficulty (RD). The purpose of the present study was to model individual differences in irregular word reading ability among 5th grade children (N = 170), oversampled for…

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to examine within-group individual differences in the code-related and oral language abilities of an economically stressed Spanish-speaking English language learner (ELL) preschool sample and to evaluate the predictive relationship of these differences to later listening comprehension. Latent class…