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…

Although reading outcomes for children with hearing loss are improving, too many of these children continue to display persistent reading difficulties. Because of these difficulties, there is an ongoing need to understand the nature of the relationships among decoding abilities, language skills, and reading achievement in this population more…

Visual processes in Grade 1 were examined for their predictive influences in nonalphanumeric and alphanumeric rapid naming (RAN) in 51 poor early and 69 typical readers. In a lagged design, children were followed longitudinally from Grade 1 to Grade 3 over 5 testing occasions. RAN outcomes in early Grade 2 were predicted by speeded and nonspeeded…

The present study evaluated which components within the simple view of reading model better predicted reading comprehension in a sample of bilingual language-minority children exposed to Italian, a highly transparent language, as a second language. The sample included 260 typically developing bilingual children who were attending either the first…

This study explored the background knowledge (BK) and reading comprehension (RC) relationship for struggling adult readers. Using confirmatory factor analyses, a single-factor BK model exhibited better fit than a two-factor model separating academic knowledge and general information, which indicates that BK represents a unidimensional construct…

This study explored the background knowledge (BK) and reading comprehension (RC) relationship for struggling adult readers. Using confirmatory factor analyses, a single-factor BK model exhibited better fit than a two-factor model separating academic knowledge and general information, which indicates that BK represents a unidimensional construct…

Although instruction has been shown to be effective at increasing vocabulary knowledge and comprehension, factors most important for promoting the acquisition of novel vocabulary are less known. In addition, few vocabulary studies have utilized models that simultaneously take into account child-level, word-level, and instructional factors to…

This paper reports the findings from a small-scale exploratory study that investigated how moving-image narratives might enable children to develop transferable reading comprehension strategies. Using short, animated, narrative films, 28 primary-aged children engaged in a 10-week programme that included the explicit instruction of comprehension…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the hypothesis that a nonlinear relationship exists between a performance-classroom climate and the reading achievement of adolescent students with learning disabilities (LD). Participants were 62 students with LD (Grades 5-9) from public elementary schools in northern Greece. Classroom climate was…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of diagnostic formative assessment feedback on early literacy skills. The participants were 12 first-grade general education teachers and 51 of their students who were assigned to the following treatments, diagnostic feedback and skills feedback (control) which lasted for 10 weeks. During the…

Many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) struggle with reading comprehension. Linguistic comprehension is an important predictor of reading comprehension, especially as children progress through elementary school and later grades. Yet, there is a dearth of research examining longitudinal relations between linguistic comprehensions in…

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…

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…

Models of irregular word reading that take into account both child- and word-level predictors have not been evaluated in typically developing children and children with reading difficulty (RD). The purpose of the present study was to model individual differences in irregular word reading ability among 5th grade children (N = 170), oversampled for…