Hearing has vital importance for language development. Deaf and hard of hearing children have problems in spoken and written language due to hearing loss. The development of written language is directly related to language skills such as listening, speaking, and reading skills. This study aims to evaluate the use of language components in written…

Grade 4 represents a critical juncture in the literacy development of young students. This article explores the role of handwriting in unlocking the higher order psycholinguistic and metacognitive resources needed to compose quality text. In particular, we investigate the threshold of control over handwriting needed to unlock vocabulary that…

Individuals with lower proficiency in a second language tend to produce more disfluent speech patterns in the second language. Speech disfluencies refer to interruptions in the forward flow of speech and are distinct from the colloquial use of "fluency," to characterize knowledge of a language. Prior research indicates that some speech…

In the current study, two experiments were carried out: the first tested the development of derivational root and word-pattern morphological awareness in Arabic; the second tested morphological processing in Arabic spelling. 143 Arabic native speaking children with normal reading skills in 2nd, 4th and 6th grade participated in the study. The…

This study investigated whether weakness in using morphological analysis to infer new word meanings during reading is a source of poor text comprehension and the relative importance of psycholinguistic and cognitive factors as contributors of poor text comprehension in English-only and English language learners. Thirty-seven poor comprehenders and…

The current study investigated the contribution of two linguistic intervention programs, phonological and morphological to the development of word spelling among skilled and poor native Arabic readers, in three grades: second, fourth and sixth. The participants were assigned to three experimental groups: morphological intervention, phonological…

Words can be informative linguistic markers of psychological constructs. The purpose of this study is to examine associations between word use and the process of making meaningful connections to a text while reading (i.e., inference generation). To achieve this purpose, think-aloud data from third-fifth grade students (N = 218) reading narrative…

This study reports evidence of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) that surfaced from English compositions of SiSwati learners of English in Swaziland, where English is a second language. Although CLI has been studied widely in other languages, it has not been studied in SiSwati and English, and its implications for instruction are not known.…

This study investigated the effect of semantic inconsistency of roots on morphological processing to explore the development of morphological representations within the mental lexicon. We examined masked priming of Hebrew words of changing semantic transparency at two reading levels. The results revealed a disparity in the performance of fourth…

Knowledge of compound word structures in Chinese and English was investigated, comparing 435 Chinese and 258 Americans, including second, fourth, and sixth graders, and college undergraduates. As anticipated, the results revealed that Chinese speakers performed better on a word structure analogy task than their English-speaking counterparts. Also,…

The present study explored the speed, accuracy, and reading comprehension of vowelized versus unvowelized scripts among 126 native Hebrew speaking children in second, fourth, and sixth grades. Findings indicated that second graders read and comprehended vowelized scripts significantly more accurately and more quickly than unvowelized scripts,…

The picture-word interference paradigm was used to shed new light on the debate concerning slow serial versus fast parallel activation of phonology in silent reading. Prereaders, beginning readers (Grades 1-4), and adults named pictures that had words printed on them. Words and pictures shared phonology either at the beginnings of words (e.g.,…

Investigations of reading have focused largely on two component processes, phonological processing and orthographic processing. However, a number of unresolved issues have hampered progress in the investigation of these abilities. Three such issues that formed the focus of the present study were (1) the extent to which tasks used to operationalize…

This article presents the results of a three-year study of "Gamestar Mechanic" (www.gamestarmechanic.com), a flash-based multiplayer online role-playing game developed for the MacArthur Foundation's digital media learning initiative by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Gamelab in New York. The game's objective is to help children…

This study investigated the influence of cognitive and linguistic skills on the reading comprehension performance of a group of learners from diverse linguistic backgrounds. The study also compared the reading comprehension performance of grade 4 children who entered kindergarten with little or no experience with English (ESL) to that of a group…