The present study aimed to explore the nature of developmental dyslexia in a language considered to have a transparent orthography, namely, Dutch. We assessed the accuracy and efficiency of decoding words and pseudowords with four lengths as well as three types of phonological ability in 2,760 typical children and 397 peers with dyslexia across…

This study examines students' exposure to print, vocabulary and decoding as predictors of spelling skills. Participants were 42 college students (Mean age 22.5, SD = 7.87; 31 females and 11 males). Hierarchical regression analyses showed that most of the variance in spelling was explained by vocabulary knowledge. When vocabulary was entered first…

This study, using a longitudinal design with a Swedish cohort of young readers, investigates if children's early word decoding ability in second grade can predict later academic performance. In an effort to estimate the unique effect of early word decoding (grade 2) with academic performance (grade 9), gender and non-verbal cognitive ability were…

This study aimed to (a) explore the roles of cognitive and language variables in predicting reading abilities of two groups of individuals with reading disabilities (i.e., dyslexia and specific language impairment) and (b) examine which variable(s) is the most predictive in differentiating two groups. Inclusion/exclusion criteria applied to…

The present study investigated the relation among reading skills and attributions, naming speed, and phonological awareness across a wide range of reading skill. Participants were 1,105 school-age children and youths from two understudied populations: African Americans and Hispanic Americans. Individual assessments of children ranging in age from…

Working memory is considered a well-established predictor of individual variation in reading comprehension in children and adults. However, how storage and processing capacities of working memory in both the phonological and semantic domain relate to reading comprehension is still unclear. In the current study, we investigated the contribution of…

Paired-associate learning is a dynamic measure of the ability to form new links between two items. This study aimed to investigate whether paired-associate learning ability is associated with success in orthographic learning, and if so, whether it accounts for unique variance beyond phonological decoding ability and orthographic knowledge. A group…

Background: Few investigations have examined the relationship between a comprehensive range of executive functioning (EF) abilities and reading. Aims: Our investigation identified components of EF that independently predicted single word reading, and determined whether their predictive role remained when additional variables were included in the…

This study was conducted to examine the factors that influence informational text comprehension and to determine how these vary for students with higher and lower component skills. The sample included 177 students in grades 3-5. Regression analyses were used to predict informational text comprehension with decoding efficiency, vocabulary…

Research has found that, on average, deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students graduate from high school reading at the fourth grade level (Allen, 1986). Additionally, DHH children of deaf parents (Charrow & Fletcher, 1974) and those with strong American Sign Language (ASL) proficiency (Strong & Prinz, 1997) tend to outperform DHH students…

This exploratory study identified underlying skill and ability differences among subgroups of adolescent and young adult struggling readers (N = 290) overall and in relation to a fluency-based instructional grouping method. We used principal axis factoring of participants' scores on 18 measures of reading-related skills and abilities identified in…

The mental lexicon plays a central role in reading comprehension (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). It encompasses the number of lexical entries in spoken and written language (vocabulary breadth), the semantic quality of these entries (vocabulary depth), and the connection strength between lexical representations (semantic relatedness); as such, it…

This purpose of this study was to develop a clearer understanding of the complex, interrelated factors that lead to successful informational text comprehension and to determine if or how these factors vary for higher and lower comprehenders. Participants (N = 177) were in grades three through five and were predominately African American (61%) and…

Studies investigating individual differences in reading ability often involve data sets containing a large number of collinear predictors and a small number of observations. In this article, we discuss the method of Random Forests and demonstrate its suitability for addressing the statistical concerns raised by such data sets. The method is…

Working with students who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) can raise questions about whether language and literacy delays and difficulties are related directly to late and limited access to spoken language, to co-occurring language learning disabilities (LLD), or to both. A new Test of Integrated Language and Literacy Skills, which incorporates…