Traditionally, it has been claimed that the non-canonical word order of passives makes them inherently more difficult to comprehend than their canonical active counterparts both in the first (L1) and second language (L2). However, growing evidence suggests that non-canonical word orders are not inherently more difficult to process than canonical…

Conceptualizing numbers as discursive constructs generated in, and for the sake of, communication, we investigated the development of the numerical discourse of Milo, a boy who was 2 years and 8 months old when we first met him and whom we then followed for 18 months. Our analyses of the child's evolving responses to the question "Where is…

Reading difficulties of children growing up in poverty contexts have not received as much attention as those of children from middle-income families. This paper analyzes the reading-related cognitive profiles of Argentine, Spanish-speaking, low-SES children with reading difficulties (RD), by comparing them with chronological age- (CA) and reading…

Introduction: It has been suggested that cognitive characteristics may affect search. This study investigated how decoding abilities, short-term memory capacity and rapid automatised naming skills relate to query formulation. Method: A total of twenty dyslexic participants and twenty non-dyslexic controls completed four standardised cognitive…

Speaking fluently requires three main processes to run smoothly: conceptualization, formulation, and articulation. This study investigates to what extent fluency in spontaneous speech in both first (L1) and second (L2) languages can be explained by individual differences in articulatory skills. A group of L2 English learners (n = 51) performed…

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to examine how different types of learning experiences affect naming impairment in aphasia. Methods: In 4 people with aphasia with naming impairment, we compared the benefits of naming treatment that emphasized "retrieval practice" (practice retrieving target names from long-term memory) with…

Two different forms of parafoveal dysfunction have been hypothesized as core deficits of dyslexic individuals: reduced parafoveal preview benefits ("too little parafovea") and increased costs of parafoveal load ("too much parafovea"). We tested both hypotheses in a single eye-tracking experiment using a modified serial rapid…

The present study examined the "visual scanning hypothesis", which suggests that fluent oculomotor control is an important component underlying the predictive relationship between Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) tasks and reading ability. Our approach was to isolate components of saccadic planning, articulation, and lexical retrieval in 3…

Similarity to known words has been found to influence novel word learning (cf. Storkel, et al., 2006; Bartolotti & Marian, 2014). The current study examines the influence of the orthographic and phonological typicality of novel written words on the acquisition of meaning and subsequent naming behavior for those items. The orthographic and…

The current study investigated the relation between simultaneous prompting (SP), computer-assisted instruction (CAI), and the receptive identification of target pictures (presented on laptop computer) for four preschool students with developmental disabilities. The students' acquisition of nontarget information through observational learning also…

In 2 variants of the color-word Stroop task, we compared 5 types of color-neutral distractors--real words (e.g., "HAT"), pseudowords (e.g., "HIX"), consonant strings (e.g., "HDK"), symbol strings (e.g., #$%), and a row of Xs (e.g., "XXX")--as well as incongruent color words (e.g., "GREEN" displayed…

This study examined the extent to which Chinese children with dyslexia show temporal processing deficits in addition to deficits in various forms of attention. In total, 104 Chinese children in primary school (Grades 3-6) were recruited in Taiwan. Half of the children were identified as having dyslexia, and the other half were typically developing…

Although several studies have examined the role of home literacy environment (HLE) in learning to read in Western societies, little is known about the role of HLE in Chinese reading. In addition, the few studies in Chinese have not tested the possible effects of HLE on reading comprehension. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the…

This study investigated the prevalence of latent classes at risk for reading or math disabilities in elementary-age children whose first language is Spanish. To this end, children (N = 394) in Grades 1, 2, and 3 were administered a battery of vocabulary, reading, math, and cognitive measures in both Spanish and English. Three important findings…

The present study examined the inhibitory processes of spoken word recognition of Chinese homophones during sentence processing, using a standard cross-modal naming experiment with an innovative design and materials construction. Results confirmed that (1) preceding sentence context has exerted an early effect on disambiguating among different…