Mind wandering occurs when a reader's thoughts are unrelated to the text's ideas. We examined the relation between mind wandering and readers' memory for text. More specifically, we assessed whether mind wandering inhibits the reader's development of the situation model and thus their ability to identify and recall the text's most central ideas.…

Developmental language disorder (DLD) and developmental dyslexia (DD) are two prevalent subtypes of Specific Learning Disabilities (SLDs; "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" [5th ed.; DSM-5]). Yet, little information is available regarding the distinct challenges faced by adults with DLD and/or DD in college. The…

We examined the relationship between two metalinguistic tasks: prosodic awareness and punctuation ability. Specifically, we investigated whether adults' ability to punctuate was related to the degree to which they are aware of and able to manipulate prosody in spoken language. English-speaking adult readers (n = 115) were administered a receptive…

Millions of adults in the United States lack the necessary literacy skills for most living wage jobs. For students from adult learning classes, we used a lexical decision task to measure their knowledge of words and we used a decision-making model (Ratcliff's, 1978, diffusion model) to abstract the mechanisms underlying their performance from…

This exploratory study identified underlying skill and ability differences among subgroups of adolescent and young adult struggling readers (N = 290) overall and in relation to a fluency-based instructional grouping method. We used principal axis factoring of participants' scores on 18 measures of reading-related skills and abilities identified in…

Introduction: Reading comprehension is a complex cognitive skill that has been associated with executive functions such as working memory (WM) and inhibition. Given that the development of these abilities continues through late adolescence, this study seeks to explore the role that both processes play with respect to varying levels of reading…

The purpose of this study was to identify cognitive and linguistic predictors of word problems with versus without irrelevant information. The sample was 701 2nd-grade students who received no specialized intervention on word problems. In the fall, they were assessed on initial arithmetic and word-problem skill as well as language ability, working…

The simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) proposes that listening comprehension and decoding, properly measured, can account for all of the variance in reading comprehension. We assessed the simple view in community college students. In addition to listening comprehension and decoding, we included measures of oral vocabulary, nonverbal…