Purpose: To date, research on effects of prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) has focused on a broad range of cognitive impairments, but relatively few studies have examined effects of PAE on development of reading skills. Although PAE has been linked to poorer reading comprehension, it remains unclear whether this impairment is attributable to…

The components involved in adolescent reading are complex and not clearly understood in struggling readers. Phrase reading, a language skill associated with prosodic understanding of syntactic phrases, has received little attention. We studied 70 adolescent readers including delayed readers to answer the following questions: (a) Do phrase-reading…

In this paper, we first introduce functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), followed by a review of three themes of neuroimaging research on the neural correlates of reading-related skills: (1) typical and struggling readers, including developmental dyslexics, (2) an inverted U-shaped function in second-language reading that portrays an…

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…

Reading comprehension is multidimensional and complex. The persistent challenges children, adolescents, and even adults face with reading comprehension call for concerted efforts to develop assessments that help identify sources of difficulties and to design instructional approaches to prevent or ameliorate these difficulties. Doing so requires…

This paper reports on the oral reading of five grade 2 to 6 isiXhosa (L1) speakers reading isiXhosa (L1) and English (L2) texts. It examines the readers' oral reading miscues (or errors) to understand the extent to which these miscues constitute a language or a literacy problem in this group of readers. Conclusions are that (a) these readers read…

This study examined syntactic comprehension in French children with dyslexia in both listening and reading. In the first syntactic comprehension task, a partial version of the Epreuve de Comprehension syntaxico-semantique (ECOSSE test; French adaptation of Bishop's test for receptive grammar test) children with dyslexia performed at a lower level…

This study assesses reading processes and/or strategies needed to deploy deep processing that could push learners towards syntactic-based constructions in L2 classrooms. Research has found L2 acquisition to present varying degrees of success and/or fossilization (Bley-Vroman 1989, Birdsong 1992 and Sharwood Smith 1994). For example, learners have…

Fourth graders who were good readers (N=95) and poor readers (N=27) were given tests of syntactic competence, vocabulary, and auditory and reading comprehension. Scores on the auditory and reading comprehension tests were significantly correlated. Poor readers performed significantly poorer on the syntactic test, but results did not support the…

Many programs designed to compute the readability of texts are narrowly based on surface-level linguistic features and take too little account of the processes which a reader brings to the text. This study is an exploratory examination of the use of Coh-Metrix, a computational tool that measures cohesion and text difficulty at various levels of…

The author supports the theory that for some disabled readers the nature of the form-schema (syntatic expectations) they make use of in processing text does not result in stable comprehension because their recognition strategies are linked to their past experience in constructing meaning from speech. Implications for instruction are discussed.…

Reexamines two current, popularly held views about reading: the relative importance of word perception versus the reader's attention to the larger syntactic and semantic redundancies of the text. Some recent findings suggest the seriousness of the difficulty for those who cannot read high-frequency simple words. (Author/DB)

This study analyzed error recovery patterns based on eye movement measures of sentence parsing, across reading level and error type, in 10 adolescents with reading disabilities and 10 controls. The groups' error recovery strategies were similar in pattern and frequency; patterns were largely organized, strategic, and efficient; and multiple…

This publication (one of a series) contains 19 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instruments for its investigation, and practical applications. Articles are: "Speech Perception Deficits in Poor Readers: Auditory Processing or Phonological Coding?" (Maria Mody and others); "Auditory…

This paper attempts to bring information to a broad audience on children's utilization of semantic and syntax context clues in reading. It reviews the research of several contemporary theorists who indicate that semantics and syntax are overlapping processes. The simultaneous use of these processes enable young, particularly struggling readers to…