Listening comprehension and word decoding are the two major determinants of the development of reading comprehension. The relative importance of different language skills for the development of listening and reading comprehension remains unclear. In this 5-year longitudinal study, starting at age 7.5 years (n = 198), it was found that the shared…

Genetics has become increasingly important in everyday life, a fact that is reflected in state and national science education standards. This study examines the relationship between 474 fifth graders' understandings of the core ideas of "inheritance of traits" and "variation of traits". A confirmatory factor analysis,…

Background and Aim: The effects of text cohesion and added pictures on acquired knowledge have been heavily studied each in isolation. Furthermore, studies on the effects of specific characteristics of pictures, whether facilitating or hindering, are scarce. Schnotz's ITCP Model (2014) allows to formulate hypotheses regarding the combined effect…

The persuasiveness of anecdotal evidence and statistical evidence has been investigated in a large number of studies, but the combination of anecdotal and statistical evidence has hardly received research attention. The present experimental study therefore investigated the persuasiveness of this combination. It also examined whether the quality of…

The transition to college may present beginning college learners with novel academic opportunities and challenges, including the requirement to learn independently from complex college-level texts. Several achievement motivation factors may play a role in explaining differences in beginning college learners' use of deep-level reading comprehension…

As a literacy instructor at a university, I regularly administered a questionnaire on reading habits and attitudes as part of the teacher education program. The findings from the surveys aligned with the results of extant literature on the prevalence of aliteracy among pre-service teachers (Applegate & Applegate, 2004; Applegate et al., 2014;…

Secondary students who struggle with reading often have deficits in the area of reading comprehension. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of explicit main idea and summarization instruction on reading comprehension of expository text for alternative high school students. The lead researcher explicitly taught participants how to…

As students experience multiliteracies across the curriculum through redefined standards, 21st century learning brings multimodal literacies to the forefront of teaching where educators are being required to use technology in their literacy instruction. When taking a New Literacies approach to meaning making from written text, educators must teach…

Pathways of relations of language, cognitive, and literacy skills (i.e., working memory, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, inference, comprehension monitoring, word reading, and listening comprehension) to reading comprehension were examined by comparing four variations of direct and indirect effects model of reading. Results from 350…

Every word signifies multiple senses. Many studies using comprehension-based measures suggest that polysemes' senses (e.g., "paper" as in "printer paper" or "term paper") share lexical representations, whereas homophones' meanings (e.g., "pen" as in "ballpoint pen" or "pig pen")…

Purpose: To further understand the effect of Parkinson's disease (PD) on articulatory movements in speech and to expand our knowledge of therapeutic treatment strategies, this study examined movements of the jaw, tongue blade, and tongue dorsum during sentence production with respect to speech intelligibility and compared the effect of varying…

Purpose: To compare vowel acoustics and intelligibility in words produced with and without contrastive stress by speakers with spastic (mixed-spastic) dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy (DYS[subscript CP]) and healthy controls (HCs). Method: Fifteen participants (9 men, 6 women; age M = 42 years) with DYS[subscript CP] and 15 HCs (9 men, 6…

This paper describes an investigation into the function of child-directed speech (CDS) across development. In the first experiment, 10-21-month-olds were presented with familiar words in CDS and trained on novel words in CDS or adult-directed speech (ADS). All children preferred the matching display for familiar words. However, only older toddlers…

Science texts use various text features and multiple representations to communicate meaning to their readers. English science texts are challenging for elementary-level English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in Taiwan because they are familiar with reading language-controlled texts from textbooks. Teaching students to make use of various…

Purpose: The current study examines the pattern of misidentified vowels produced by individuals with dysarthria secondary to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Method: Twenty-three individuals with ALS and 22 typical individuals produced 10 monophthongs in an /h/-vowel-/d/ context. One hundred thirty-five listeners completed a forced-choice…