Theory of Mind (ToM) is a skill of social cognition recently of interest to literacy researchers. This article presents initial findings from a pilot study investigating the use of ToM to teach theme identification and theme statement formation to beginning readers who are less-skilled in comprehension. The authors designed a brief, 1:1 listening…

In contrast to the large body of research investigating intervention for poor decoding skills, far fewer studies have evaluated interventions for reading comprehension. There is even less research on children with more specific difficulties with reading comprehension, often referred to as "poor comprehenders". Levels of effectiveness…

This research compared the contributions of lexical inferencing, decoding, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL) enrolled in university bridging programs in the U.S. and Chinese-speaking university learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China.…

The use of integrated tasks to test English-speaking skills raises questions about the impact of comprehension on test score outcomes, and the impact of stimulus materials on test-taker strategic behaviours. This study analysed speaking performances and verbal report data to examine the strategies used by test takers at different levels of…

This study examines the contribution of print exposure to oral language (expressive vocabulary and listening comprehension) and reading (word reading and reading comprehension) in first and second grade in Chile, and tests whether the contribution of print exposure to reading comprehension is mediated by language and word reading skills.…

We investigated the dimensionality of inference making in samples of 4- to 9-year-olds (Ns = 416-783) to determine if local and global coherence inferences could be distinguished. In addition, we examined the validity of our experimenter-developed inference measure by comparing with three additional measures of listening comprehension. Multitrait,…

Establishing local coherence relations is central to text comprehension. Positive-causal coherence relations link a cause and its consequence, whereas negative-causal coherence relations add a contrastive meaning (negation) to the causal link. According to the cumulative cognitive complexity approach, negative-causal coherence relations are…

The present five-year longitudinal study from preschool to grade 3 examined the developmental associations among oral language comprehension, task orientation, reading precursors, and reading fluency, as well as their role in predicting grade 3 reading comprehension. Ninety Finnish-speaking students participated in the study. The students' oral…

The current 2-part study investigated the relative contributions of English language training (ELT) and computerized Cogmed working memory training (WMT) to improvements in English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) proficiency and working memory capacity. In Study 1, Japanese undergraduate EFL learners were randomly allocated to 1 of 3 experimental…

Two studies aimed to investigate the reading comprehension abilities of 14 readers with Down syndrome aged 6 years 8 months to 13 years relative to those of typically developing children matched on word reading ability, and to investigate how these abilities were associated with reading accuracy, listening comprehension, phonological awareness and…

Emerging evidence suggests that children's sensitivity to suprasegmental phonology such as stress and timing (i.e., prosodic sensitivity) contributes to reading. The primary goal of this study was to investigate pathways of the relation of prosodic sensitivity to reading (word reading and reading comprehension) using data from 370 first-grade…

Connectives (e.g., although, meanwhile) carry abstract meanings and often signal key relationships between text ideas. This study explored whether understanding of connectives represents a unique domain of vocabulary knowledge that provides special leverage for reading comprehension, and whether the contribution of knowledge of connectives to…

Research has shown that English and German native speakers use prosodic cues during speech production to convey the intended meaning of an utterance. However, little is known about whether American L2 learners of German also use such cues during L2 production. The present study shows that inter-mediate-level L2 learners of German (English L1) use…

Listening and reading comprehension of paragraph-length material are considered higher-order language skills fundamental to social and academic functioning. Using ecologically relevant language stimuli that were matched for difficulty according to developmental level, we analyze the effects of task, age, neuropsychological skills, and post-task…

Receptive foreign language proficiency is usually measured with reading and listening comprehension tasks. A novel approach to assess such proficiencies--viewing comprehension--is based on the presentation of short instructional videos followed by one or more comprehension questions concerning the preceding video stimulus. In order to evaluate a…