Many studies have shown that morphological knowledge has effects on reading comprehension separate from other aspects of language knowledge. This has implications for reading instruction and assessment: it suggests that children could have reading comprehension difficulties that are due to a lack of morphological knowledge, and thus, that explicit…

Prior research on reading difficulties has mainly focused on word decoding problems. However, there exists another group of children -- poor comprehenders (PCs) -- who have normal word decoding abilities but difficulties in reading comprehension. Less is known about PCs especially in non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese. This study identified…

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…

Resumptive pronouns are often regarded as a last-resort strategy for rescuing illicit long-distance dependencies. Previous work has demonstrated a facilitative role for resumptive pronouns in production as well as in comprehension, though not a grammatical option in the languages. This study examined whether the same pattern is found in Cantonese,…

Word finding difficulties (WFDs) occur in more than a quarter of children who are receiving speech and language therapy. This study provides the first investigation of the continuity in WFDs and investigates whether WFDs are associated with phonological or semantically related abilities. Thirty-eight children with WFDs were seen at age 7;0 and at…