Offers some new evidence about sensitivity to morphemes and the decoding skills of American children in grades three through six. Focuses on knowledge of derivational suffixes, which is examined with sentence completion and sentence acceptability tasks that manipulate the suffixes in real words and nonsense derived forms. Indicates that knowledge…

Describes a study in which 100 university students completed tests of spelling production, vocabulary, reading comprehension, reading experience, and reading accuracy. Finds that reading experience, as measured by an adaptation of the Author Recognition Test, and reading accuracy contributed to the prediction of spelling beyond the joint…

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)

Finds that the variation in literacy activity found among undergraduate college students is associated with the ability to interpret texts by enhancing the ability to deal with subtle distinctions among mental-state verbs; however, the view that print exposure fosters decontextualized reasoning, as typified in syllogistic reasoning, received only…

A reading proficiency test administered to 200 adult learners in India resulted in an average score of only 38%. Gender, caste, income, and occupation were significant factors in the level of reading proficiency. (SK)

A lexical decision study with two groups of tertiary students (n=43) differing in their Chinese language ability found that even for adult readers differing in their Chinese language ability, lexicality, frequency of characters, and the consistency of semantic radicals affect accurate and rapid character identification. Teaching suggestions are…

Presents an account of the literacy activities engaged in by the parents of 29 children around the time that the children were about to start school. Finds a considerable amount of literacy activity evident in the homes, regardless of whether the children were fluent readers or not. Argues that home environment is not enough to account for…

Investigates whether Brazilian Portuguese-speaking prereaders who have mastered letter names are capable of processing letter-sound relations to learn to read words in which the letters correspond to phonemes contained in the names of the letters. Suggests they can use their knowledge of the names of the letters to learn to read by processing and…

Considers how people read and why some people fail to read well. Discusses the definitions of developmental dyslexia and temporal processing. Illustrates construals of what a temporal processing deficit might entail. Suggests that discovery of an association between a neuroanatomical and/or neurophysiological measure and reading ability is not…

This study compared the effects of two oral reading feedback strategies in improving the reading comprehension of eight school-age children with low reading ability. Participants were assigned to one of two intervention groups matched on age, grade, gender, and general reading performance. Intervention 1 (I1) used traditional decoding-based…

Background: The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA) (Neale, 1997) is widely used in education and research. It provides measures of reading accuracy (decoding) and comprehension, which are frequently interpreted separately. Aims: Three studies were conducted to investigate the degree to which the NARA measures could be separated. Samples:…

Reading is fundamental to learning from textbooks and other written materials in all content areas. Unfortunately, most children are brought up on a diet of narrative literature, but by the time they get to third grade, their textbooks are mainly informational (expository) instead of narrative, and sentence structures evolve from simple to…

Reading and speechreading are both visual skills based on speech and language processing. Here we explore individual differences in speechreading in profoundly prelingually deaf adults, hearing adults with a history of dyslexia, and hearing adults with no history of a literacy disorder. Speechreading skill distinguished the three groups: the deaf…

Research on dyslexia has focused on the phonological level of linguistic analysis. Here we extend the investigation of the linguistic competence of individuals with dyslexia to the morphological level of linguistic analysis. We examine whether adult Hebrew readers with dyslexia extract and represent morphemic units similarly to normal readers.…

Despite the clear and longstanding connection between meaning vocabulary and reading comprehension, programs designed to teach vocabulary have often had surprisingly little impact on overall reading ability. One possible reason for this small effect is that teaching methods may not make this vocabulary-to-comprehension connection explicit for the…