Books designed for beginning readers typically intermix text with illustrations in close proximity. Prior research suggests this standard layout may reduce literacy skills due to increased attentional competition between text and illustrations. The current study extends this work by examining whether manipulations to the book layout can enhance…

The connections among language, writing system, and reading are part of what confronts a child in learning to read. We examine these connections in addressing how reading processes adapt to the variety of written language and how writing adapts to language. The first adaptation (reading to writing), as evidenced in behavioral and neuroscience…

An increasingly prevalent and accessible form of hybrid nonfiction picture books blends factual information with poetry or poetic devices to create literary nonfiction. This important form of hybrid text has been sparsely examined. This article addresses three questions about poetic nonfiction picture books: first, how might we categorize picture…

Standards of coherence are one of the major factors that influence reading comprehension. This study investigated the standards of coherence that second language (L2) learners employ when reading. In a pair of experiments, Japanese learners of English read two-sentence texts with varying causal and semantic relatedness between sentences and then…

The effects of psycholinguistic variables are critical to the evaluation of theories about the cognitive reading system. However, reading research has tended to focus on the impact of key variables on average performance. We report the first investigation examining variation in psycholinguistic effects across the life span, from childhood into old…

This study investigated whether memory for conflicting information predicted mental representation of source-content links (i.e., who said what) in a sample of 86 Norwegian adolescent readers. Participants read four texts presenting conflicting claims about sun exposure and health. With differences in gender, prior knowledge, and interest…

Beginning readers and struggling readers need explicit, systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics (Adams, 2008; Ehri,1992, 1998; Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Schuster, & Yaghoub-Zadeh, 2001; Gaskins et al., 1997; Moats, 2004; Morris, 2015; National Reading Panel, 2000; Reutzel, 2015). Ehri and McCormick's (2008) phases of word learning…

Literacy educators hold different beliefs about the best approaches to teach students how to read and about the reading process including a skills view of reading and learning to read versus a transactional, sociopsycholinguistic view of reading and learning to read (Weaver, 2002). Reading for understanding is an important skill to develop in…

The study investigated parafoveal preprocessing by the means of the classical invisible boundary paradigm and a novel manipulation of the parafoveal previews (i.e., visual degradation). Eye movements were investigated on 5-letter target words with constraining (i.e., highly informative) initial letters or similarly constraining final letters.…

There has been an increasing volume of evidence supporting the role of the syllable in word processing tasks. Recently it has also been shown that orthographic redundancy, related to the pattern of bigram frequencies, could not explain the syllable number effect on lexical decision times. This was demonstrated on a large sample of words taken from…

Forty-four children, identified by their kindergarten teachers as independent readers upon public school entrance, were interviewed to assess their perceptions of how and when they learned to read. In addition to interviews, the children's literacy behaviors were observed in their normal classroom settings and in individual shared book experiences…

In response to an increased emphasis on disciplinary literacy in the secondary science classroom, an investigation of the literacy processes utilized by high school students while reading scientific text was undertaken. A think-aloud protocol was implemented to collect data on the processes students used when not prompted while reading a magazine…

Recent theories of short-term memory (STM) distinguish between item information, which reflects the temporary activation of long-term representations stored in the language system, and serial-order information, which is encoded in a specific representational system that is independent of the language network. Some studies examining the…

Although repeated reading--a pedagogical practice often involving phonological support in which learners revisit novel forms in context--has been extensively studied in terms of reading fluency and comprehension, little research has explored whether it promotes language acquisition. The current study, an attempt to fill this gap, found that…

The study explored the moderating role of rapid automatized naming (RAN) in reading achievement through a cusp-catastrophe model grounded on nonlinear dynamic systems theory. Data were obtained from a community sample of 496 second through fourth graders who were followed longitudinally over 2 years and split into 2 random subsamples (validation…