Although metaphors are essential tools in everyday communication and educational settings, the literature lacks evidence of effective training tools to promote metaphor comprehension in typical development. Grounding in theoretical pragmatics, we developed a novel metaphor comprehension training (MetaCom) for school-age children that focuses on…

This study compared the sentence hyperbole comprehension performance of Chinese poor readers with various levels of arithmetic proficiency. A total of 168 Chinese poor readers in Grade 1 were recruited, and their nonverbal intelligence, verbal working memory, Chinese receptive vocabulary, Chinese grammatical knowledge, character reading and…

This study investigated the correlation and predictive capacity of verbal working memory (VWM) to the reading comprehension of children in their first language (L1) and second language (L2). The term verbal working memory refers to a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can hold and manipulate verbal and auditory information temporarily.…

Cognitive flexibility (CF) is an executive function component related to the ability to flexibly shift amongst multiple incompatible perspectives or descriptions of an object task. However, whether CF enhances the narrative discourse comprehension of students with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) during surface semantic meaning…

This study examines the role of receptive vocabulary knowledge on outcomes of the TOEFL reading comprehension task. Participants included 18 native speakers of Spanish learning English as a foreign language and 17 native speakers of English ranging in age from 19-25 years. Lexical stimuli were presented auditorily and were divided into…

Motor skills have been linked to language and social development with implications for theory of mind. This study examined theory of mind (attribution of intentions task) in school-age children (N = 62, mean age 8 years; 2 months, standard deviation [SD] = 1;3) in relation to fine motor skills (grooved pegboard), receptive vocabulary (Peabody…

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…

Multiple cognitive skills support the acquisition of proficient reading skills. Higher order processing abilities allowing the engagement and integration of multiple ideas collectively referred to as executive functions may be particularly important in reading comprehension. In the present study, 39 Danish school age children completed executive…

This study explores morpho-syntactic reading comprehension in 19 Spanish children who received a cochlear implant (CI) before 24 months of age (early CI [e-CI]) and 19 Spanish children who received a CI after 24 months (late CI [l-CI]). They all were in primary school and were compared to a hearing control (HC) group of 19 children. Tests of…

This study of 4- to 6-year-olds had 2 aims: first, to determine how lower level comprehension skills (receptive vocabulary and grammar) and verbal memory support early higher level comprehension skills (inference and literal story comprehension), and second, to establish the predictive power of these skills on subsequent reading comprehension.…

This cohort-sequential study explored the components of working memory (WM) that underlie second language (L2) reading growth in 450 children at risk and not at risk for reading disabilities (RD) whose first language is Spanish. English language learners designated as balanced and nonbalanced bilinguals with and without risk for RD in Grades 1, 2,…

Children born preterm are at risk for deficits in language and reading. They are also at risk for injury to the white matter of the brain. The goal of this study was to determine whether performance in language and reading skills would be associated with white matter properties in children born preterm and full-term. Children born before 36 weeks…

Research on the reading skills of monolingual children has established a convergent skills model for acquisition involving context-free decoding, language comprehension, and visual and phonological processing. This study sought to identify the predictors of Primary One bilingual children's reading accuracy and reading comprehension in English.…

Although studies of long-term outcomes of children born preterm consistently show low intelligence quotient (IQ) and visual-motor impairment, studies of their performance in language and reading have found inconsistent results. In this study, we examined which specific language and reading skills were associated with prematurity independent of the…

This study investigated some of the underlying factors that may relate to and predict the reading comprehension of children in fourth through eighth grade (N = 47). A subset of these children previously had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD; n = 10); the remainder are classified as typically-developing (n = 37). The participants…