Students who have problems comprehending textual material tend to experience failing grades, peer rejection, and even social isolation. Furthermore, students with poor reading comprehension demonstrate poor academic performance in all subjects, not due to difficulty in learning specific subject content (i.e., math, history, etc.), but rather their…

According to the Simple View of Reading, reading ability can be divided into decoding and language comprehension. In the present study, decoding and comprehension's contribution to reading ability was studied both in children with reading difficulties and in children with typical reading ability. Decoding and comprehension was further divided into…

In transparent orthographies like German, isolated learning disabilities in either reading or spelling are common and occur as often as a combined reading and spelling disability. However, most issues surrounding the cognitive causes of these isolated or combined literacy difficulties are yet unresolved. Recently, working memory dysfunctions have…

When skilled readers read briefly-presented word pairs, they produce between-word errors, in which letters migrate between neighboring words (e.g., "mild wind" can be misread as "wild mind"). Such errors are also produced by individuals with attentional dyslexia, even without time limitation. In this study, we tested several aspects of skilled…

We examine the performance of dyslexic participants on an unsupervised categorization task against that of matched non-dyslexic control participants. Unsupervised categorization is a cognitive process critical for conceptual development. Existing research in dyslexia has emphasized perceptual tasks and supervised categorization tasks (for which…

Executive functions, including inhibition, have been implicated in children's reading ability. This study investigates whether children's performance on an inhibition task is more indicative of reading ability than a measure of another executive function, that is, planning. Fifty-three male participants were administered a reading test and tests…

Individual differences in reading and cognitive processing among a sample of generally poor readers were studied in order to answer two major questions: Do they have a specific cognitive style that favors global-simultaneous strategies and a weak sequential strategy? If they do not have a distinct cognitive style or strategy, but are merely poor…

Unsupported assumptions that dyslexics differ from other poor readers by having higher intelligence are challenged by a developmental model proposing that reading difficulty results from early language delays and environmental factors. A mixed transactional model that incorporates early language problems and IQ may be more appropriate. (SK)

Background: Co-morbidity of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and reading disorder (RD) is frequent. The objective of this investigation was to assess the potential uniqueness of co-morbid ADHD + RD and extend existing findings to the Hebrew language. Method: A parallel group design with post-hoc analysis of group differences was…

Investigated the relationship between auditory temporal processing of nonspeech sounds and phonological awareness ability in 8- to 12-year-olds with a reading disability, placed in groups based on performance on Tallal's tone-order judgment task. Found that a tone-order deficit did not relate to performance on order processing of speech sounds, to…

Investigated whether limitations in the enhancement of learning-disabled readers' working memory (WM) performance are attributable to process or storage functions. Found that: intercorrelations among diverse WP measures increased on demanding conditions; and verbal WM was not directly related to reading skill, supporting the notion that poor…

Matched groups of normal and retarded readers were required to perform same/difference judgments in which the interval between standard and comparison stimuli was either 0, 1, or 6 seconds. (BRT)

Evaluation of simultaneous and successive information processing skills, language and reading processes, and reading achievement of 105 reading disabled children (ages 7 to 15 years) indicated that subjects tended to employ simultaneous processing in reading tasks normally requiring successive processing. (Author/DB)

Three experiments exploring the relationship of cognitive effort to the differences in word recall between skilled and learning disabled readers are described. Results suggest the amount of cognitive effort that can be effectively expended to produce a distinctive memory trace is related to individual differences in attentional capacity.…

Examines, in two experiments, the memory coding processes of readers during reading of connected text. Finds that, along with phonological coding, semantic processing contributes an important amount of variance to deficiencies in the reading of connected text. (RS)