The notion of sentencehood in Mandarin Chinese is much less well-defined than in many other languages, with a block of clauses often joined by commas without conjunctions and with the period often occurring at the end of a block of clauses to indicate meaning completeness rather than the completeness of a sentential structure. The potential…

Organisational signals and sources can be considered metatextual cues that guide the processing of the discourse. Organisational signals encourage readers to use the structure strategy, while source information reveals the epistemic and formal properties of texts. This study addressed three gaps in prior research about these topics: (1) whether…

This study examined the direct and indirect relations of foundational language skills (vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, and orthographic knowledge), higher-order cognitive skills (inference making and comprehension monitoring), and word reading to reading comprehension in Chinese. Consistent with the hierarchical relations specified in the Direct…

We tested the effects of diglossia and orthography on reading in Arabic, manipulating reading in Spoken Arabic (SA), using Arabizi, in which it is written using Latin letters on computers/phones, and the two forms of the conventional written form Modern Standard Arabic (MSA): vowelled (shallow) and unvowelled (deep). 77 skilled readers in 8th…

The present study explored the mediating effect of word detection on the relationship between visual-spatial attention and reading comprehension in Chinese. The participants included 287 Hong Kong Chinese children (167 third graders, 84 girls, "mean age" = 8.73, SD = 0.49, and 120 fourth graders, 45 girls, "mean age" = 9.93, SD…

Language-specific features necessitate certain processes and skills in reading. The visually unmarked between-word boundaries in written Chinese render it critical that readers be able to segment words in the continuous texts. It may pose challenges for second language (L2) readers whose first language (L1) is word-spaced. In light of the lack of…

This study investigated how experience with a first language (L1) writing system affects the development of the second language (L2) word recognition subskills and how L2 linguistic knowledge constrains such L1 impacts. In this study, word recognition is conceptualized as a complex construct that entails multiple subskills necessary for…

We employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffuse tensor imaging (DTI) to study neural implications of silent reading of words in mutually comprehensible but visually and orthographically distinct languages for example Hindi and Urdu by independent groups of skilled readers. The fMRI results (conjunction analyses) showed the…

Measures of decoding and oral language have been shown to predict early reading comprehension across a wide variety of languages, though the timeframe and strength of the predictions vary by orthographic depth. This study is the first to examine predictors of early reading in Vietnamese, a transparent orthography of Romanized letters and…

The purpose of the present study was to explore the role of morphological awareness in reading comprehension in different language learning contexts (ESL and EFL). Korean ESL and Korean EFL learners (50 and 257 respectively) in grades five and six were administered measures of L2 (English) morphological, phonological, and orthographic awareness…

This study investigated the syntactic ability of 82 struggling adult readers who recognize words between the third and fifth grade levels. Analysis of the adults' performance on the TOLD-I:3 indicated that they were deficient on the syntactic task. Correlations found the struggling adult readers' oral language skills, written language skills, and…

The connection between language and reading is well established across many languages studied to date. Little is known, however, about the role of language in reading in Arabic--a Semitic language characterized by diglossia--in which the oral and written varieties differ across language components. This study examined the relationship among…