The work presented here is an empirical study of how advanced learners of English as a foreign language in Argentina access and understand the culture-specific dimensions of literary narrative texts. It has three purposes. First, to extend research into reading in a foreign language to take account of the culture-specific content of texts. Second,…

Phonological awareness has been repeatedly reported as important for learning to read in different orthographies. It is important to understand what specific levels of phonological awareness are involved in Chinese and English for Chinese children who learn English-as-a-second-language (ESL). Measures of phonological awareness, word reading,…

Two experiments explored learning, generalization, and the influence of semantics on orthographic processing in an artificial language. In Experiment 1, 16 adults learned to read 36 novel words written in novel characters. Posttraining, participants discriminated trained from untrained items and generalized to novel items, demonstrating extraction…

Although it is well recognized that reading skills vary in people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), reasons for this variability are not well understood. We used the simple view of reading model to investigate both word decoding and text comprehension processes in two well-established subtypes within the autism spectrum, those with…

Background music has been found to have beneficial, detrimental, or no effect on a variety of behavioral and psychological outcome measures. This article reports a meta-analysis that attempts to summarize the impact of background music. A global analysis shows a null effect, but a detailed examination of the studies that allow the calculation of…

In Chinese orthography, a dominant character structure exists in which a semantic radical appears on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters); a minority opposite arrangement also exists (PS characters). As the number of phonetic radical types is much greater than semantic radical types, in SP characters the information is…

This study investigated the flow of interest in a reading-to-write activity. It was hypothesized that (a) different contents in a text would stimulate different types of interest and (b) different writing tasks would impact differently students' use of interesting text segments. Participants were 247 11th- and 12th-grade students, who were divided…

This article explores second year pre-service teachers' ability to work with Indigenous students and their families during a small-scale project conducted in an Indigenous community. Supported field placements offered the pre-service teachers valuable opportunities to engage with the teaching of reading to Indigenous students "on their…

Concern over worldwide literacy rates prompted the United Nations to establish the UN Literacy Decade (2003-2012) with one area of focus being to provide support to schools to develop effective literacy programs (UNESCO, 2005). This study addressed the area of providing support to schools to develop effective literacy programs by exploring the…

Learning to read is a complex process that develops normally in the majority of children and requires the mapping of graphemes to their corresponding phonemes. Problems with the mapping process nevertheless occur in about 5% of the population and are typically attributed to poor phonological representations, which are--in turn--attributed to…

This study investigates brain potentials to derived word forms in Spanish. Two experiments were performed on derived nominals that differ in terms of their productivity and semantic properties but are otherwise similar, an acceptability judgment task and a reading experiment using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in which correctly and…

This self-paced reading study first tested the prediction that the garden path effect previously observed during the processing of subject-object ambiguities in native English would not obtain in a null subject language like Spanish. The investigation then further explored whether the effect would be evident among near-native readers of Spanish…

Diffusion tensor imaging tractography is a structural magnetic resonance imaging technique allowing reconstruction and assessment of the integrity of three dimensional white matter tracts, as indexed by their fractional anisotropy. It is assumed that the left arcuate fasciculus plays a crucial role for reading development, as it connects two…

Dutch children, from the second and fourth grade of primary school, were each given a visual lexical decision test on 210 Dutch monomorphemic words. After removing words not recognized by a majority of the younger group, (lexical) decisions were analysed by mixed-model regression methods to see whether morphological Family Size influenced decision…

This study compares the relative effectiveness of reading and writing sentences for the incidental acquisition of new vocabulary in a second language. It also examines if recall varies according to the concreteness of target words. Participants were 203 French-speaking intermediate and advanced English as second language (ESL) learners, tested for…