Socioeconomic status (SES)-related language gaps are known to widen throughout the course of the school years; however, not all children from lower SES homes perform worse than their higher SES peers on measures of language. The current study uses mediation and moderated mediation to examine how cognitive and language abilities (vocabulary,…

The aim of this study was to illuminate the relationships between the three components of oral reading fluency, sustained attention, working memory, and text comprehension in typically developing third-grade students (N = 140). The findings of hierarchical regression analysis reveal that speed, accuracy, and prosody together significantly…

This exploratory study aimed at developing a dyslexia assessment tool in the Amharic language and to collect initial reliability and validity data on the tool designed to identify dyslexia in Grade 3. The developed battery consists of 10 tests. Data were collected from 121 Amharic-speaking children, aged 9-12 years. Evidence of construct validity…

The present study aimed to examine the role of phonological--semantic flexibility (PSF) in learning to read Chinese. PSF refers to a specific flexibility applied to process the dual linguistic dimensions of words (i.e., sound and meaning). A correlational study (Study 1) was conducted to determine the unique contribution of PSF to three aspects of…

Reading fluency involves a complex interaction of different cognitive skills and abilities that develop with instruction and practice and relies on the automaticity of many distinct reading skills (e.g., pacing, word recognition, expression, phonological awareness). Fluent reading frees cognitive resources, such as working memory, for more…

The purpose of this study was to classify Korean readers into subgroups based on their reading achievement and to examine the relationships between these subgroups and a set of cognitive-linguistic variables. The reading achievement and cognitive-linguistic skills of 394 elementary school students were measured and the data were analyzed by…

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…

The authors propose an integrative theoretical model of reading called the direct and indirect effects model of reading (DIER) that builds on and extends several prominent theoretical models of reading. According to DIER, the following skills and knowledge are involved in reading comprehension: word reading, listening comprehension, text reading…

The authors propose an integrative theoretical model of reading called the direct and indirect effects model of reading (DIER) that builds on and extends several prominent theoretical models of reading. According to DIER, the following skills and knowledge are involved in reading comprehension: word reading, listening comprehension, text reading…

The goal of the present study was to investigate the effect of short Arabic vowels on listening comprehension. It is well documented that short vowels affect reading and reading comprehension in Arabic literacy. Since reading comprehension and listening comprehension share many commonalities, it is assumed that short vowels will positively affect…

In this chapter, we examine adult- and child-focused models of reading with respect to cognitive processing deficits associated with low literacy. We examine influential integrative models of reading and reading comprehension. We then review the empirical literature on components of reading ability, subdivided into three categories: language…

Unlike English, short vowel sounds in Arabic are represented by diacritics rather than letters. According to the presence and absence of these vowel diacritics, the Arabic script can be considered more or less transparent in comparison with other orthographies. The purpose of this study was to investigate the contribution of working memory to…

We investigated whether and how standardized behavioral measures of reading and electrophysiological measures of reading were related in 72 typically developing, late elementary school children. Behavioral measures included standardized tests of spelling, phonological processing, vocabulary, comprehension, naming speed, and memory.…

Second language (L2) educators have proposed a unique anxiety for general L2 learning and an anxiety specific to L2 reading. Since the early 1990s, the L2 anxiety concept has been challenged on theoretical and empirical grounds. In this investigation, U.S. high school L2 learners were administered the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS)…

The aim of this study was to examine predictions derived from a proposal about the relation between word-decoding skill and working memory capacity, called verbal efficiency theory. The theory states that poor word representations and slow decoding processes consume resources in working memory that would otherwise be used to execute high-level…