Background: In opaque orthographies, such as English, children with low reading skills tend to rely more on semantic information due to their inadequate acquisition of sub-lexical knowledge. This tendency has also been reported for kanji, a non-alphabetic and opaque Japanese orthography. However, previous studies on this phenomenon have had…

Background: A significant portion of adults struggle to read at a basic level. Word reading (defined here as decoding and word recognition) appears to play a pivotal role for this population of readers; however, less is known about how word reading relates to other important semantic processes (e.g., vocabulary, sentence processing) known to…

The current study examined the proficiency of Israeli adolescents in reading single words in English, which is taught as a foreign language, and what language skills predict individual variability. Parallel measures of word reading, phonology, decoding, morpho-syntax and vocabulary in Hebrew and English were administered to 217 adolescents in 8th…

This study examines whether orthographic processing transfers across languages to reading when the writing systems under acquisition are sufficiently related. We conducted a study with 76 7-year-old English-first-language children in French immersion. Measures of English and French orthographic processing (orthographic choice tasks) and…

Remediation of a serious lack in reading fluency often takes the form of repeated reading exercises. The present study examines whether transfer of training effects to untrained (neighbour) words can be enhanced by training with an orthographic focus as compared with emphasising semantics. The effect of oral versus silent reading during training…

In this article, we discuss two characteristics of the majority of current behaviour- and molecular-genetic studies of reading ability and disability, specifically, the ascertainment strategies and the populations from which samples are selected. In the context of this discussion, we present data that we collected on a sample of Swahili-speaking…

Examines the evidence for and against three major approaches to the teaching of specific reading disabled children: the process approaches, the specialist methods, and the modality/treatment interaction methods. Concludes that all differ in terms of their assumptions and consequent remediation, and all have a number of associated difficulties.…

Suggests that, in the majority of the aspects of the reading process examined, there was a statistically significant interaction between illustration and difficulty levels. Finds that reading performance in the illustrated conditions was superior to that in the unillustrated conditions at the lower level of difficulty. (JD)

Analyzes the task performance of two groups of readers--those who made gains and those who did not make gains in a remedial reading situation in order to determine their use of word identification cues. Shows that the gain group was more analytical of the test words and tended to use more units of varying size. (HOD)

Reports on two experiments that explore the comprehension difficulties of children with normal word recognition ability. Concludes that skilled readers engage in more constructive processing and that comprehension difficulties are not the result of a defective working memory. (SRT)