Traditional measures of reading ability designed for younger students typically focus on componential skills (e.g., decoding, vocabulary), and the items are often presented in a discrete and decontextualized format. The current study was designed to explore whether it was feasible to develop a more integrated, scenario-based assessment of…

Purpose: Morphological awareness refers to the ability to consider and manipulate consciously the smallest units of meaning in language. In previous studies investigating students' morphological awareness, no consistent task has been used to measure this skill across grade levels and comparisons among studies have been based on tasks, which…

Williams syndrome is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by deletion of approximately 25 genes on chromosome 7q11.23. Children with the syndrome evidence large individual differences in both broad language and reading abilities. Nevertheless, as a group, children with this syndrome show a consistent pattern characterized by relative…

Many students from elementary school through college encounter difficulty understanding their science textbooks, regardless of whether they have language disorders. This article discusses some of the particular difficulties associated with science text comprehension and possible remedies for facilitating and enhancing comprehension of challenging…

Linguistic cohesion involves the semantic and syntactic relationships that link sentences together. Research on linguistic cohesion is related to readability and to developmental and ability-level issues in reading/writing. Instructional strategies for low-ability readers/writers include predicting comprehension problems through cohesion analysis…