This special issue of "JREE" ["Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness"] features studies from three of the teams (Barnes, Stuebing, Fletcher, Barth, & Francis; Language and Reading Research Consortium, Arthur, & Davis; LaRusso et al.) supported by the Institute of Education Sciences--Reading for Understanding…

We investigated the processing of ambiguous double-PP constructions in Hebrew. Selection restrictions forced the first prepositional phrase (PP1) to attach low, but PP2 could attach maximally high to VP or maximally low to the NP inside PP1. A length contrast in PP2 was also examined. This construction affords more potential locations for prosodic…

Roald Dahl is famous for his lexical creativity, for his skill in naming his characters, his ability to create names for a variety of imagined creatures and sweets, and for his most mentioned achievement in creating the language used by the BFG. This paper presents an overview of the development and patterning of Dahl's word creation as found in a…

There has been a great deal of research on first language (L1) and second language (L2) learning through meaning-focused input since Nagy, Herman & Anderson's (1985) seminal study of incidental vocabulary learning through reading. Two strands of research within this area are incidental vocabulary learning through listening and guessing from…

The ability to navigate and comprehend online informational text is essential for 21st century learners. It requires orchestrating a mix of old and new reading strategies--and it's easy for teachers and students to feel overwhelmed! This column describes a way of combining student screencasting with Reciprocal Teaching to help students--and…

Studies examining age of onset (AoO) effects in childhood bilingualism have provided mixed results as to whether early sequential bilingual children (eL2) differ from simultaneous bilingual children (2L1) and L2 children on the acquisition of morphosyntax. Differences between the three groups have been attributed to other factors such as length of…

When reading from left to right, useful information acquired during each fixational pause is widely assumed to extend 14 to 15 characters to the right of fixation but just 3 to 4 characters to the left, and certainly no further than the beginning of the fixated word. However, this leftward extent is strikingly small and seems inconsistent with…

This study investigated whether the ability to learn word-object associations following minimal exposure (i.e., fast mapping) was associated with concurrent and later language abilities in children with ASD. Children who were poor learners at age 3½ had significantly lower receptive language abilities than children who successfully learned the new…

This article investigates infant comprehension of filler-gap dependencies. Three experiments probe 15- and 20-month-olds' comprehension of two filler-gap dependencies: "wh"-questions and relative clauses. Experiment 1 shows that both age groups appear to comprehend "wh"-questions. Experiment 2 shows that only the younger…

The purpose of this study has been to explore young children's understandings and experiences of friendship as these manifested in children's behaviours, in a reception class setting. Drawing on an evolutionary, ecological framework, friendship is seen as not only the expression and further development of social understandings and cognitive…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether systematic instruction of informational texts can enhance kindergarteners' cognitive involvement in text discussion and comprehension skills. The sample consisted of 15 children aged 5-6 years old in a kindergarten classroom located in a rural area in Rethymno, Crete. A four-phase…

Middle-school students completed a comprehension assessment. The following day, they read four, 120-word passages, two standard and two non-standard ransom-note passages with altered font sizes. Altering font sizes increased students' reading time (i.e., reduced reading speed) by an average of 3 s and decreased students' words correct per minute…

A process writing project in a third-grade classroom explored the idea of using nonfiction mentor texts to assist students in writing their own creative informational texts about animals. By looking at author craft and structure during close reading activities with nonfiction Twin Texts, students were taught how to emulate these techniques in…

This study examines whether rereading effects transfer across two different languages at the passage level. Fluent Korean-German bilinguals read passages twice either in the same language or a different language, and passages shared either words or situations. The dependent measure was the overall reading time for the second passage reading.…

The difficulties that students face when reading science texts go beyond understanding vocabulary and syntactic structures. Comprehension of science texts requires students to infer how these texts function as a unit to communicate scientific meaning. To help students in this process, science texts sometimes employ logical connectives (e.g.,…