Purpose: The aim of the study was to determine the ability of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) to infer word class and meaning from text and to document variations by word class (noun, verb, adjective) and modality (listening, reading). We also asked whether the children could integrate global cues across the entire passage as…

Purpose: Using a longitudinal design, this study aimed to describe inferential comprehension abilities of neglected French-speaking preschool children from 42 to 66 months of age in comparison to non-neglected peers, to examine the association with receptive vocabulary, and to determine whether rates of change in inferential abilities over time…

Listening narrative comprehension is a complex process that requires the processing of explicit (i.e., information presented in the text) and implicit information (i.e., information inferable from the text) and involves several linguistic and cognitive skills. However, the specific role of these skills in children's comprehension remains unclear.…

Reading comprehension is a fundamental skill to be developed from the early stages of reading acquisition and it is essential for both formative and personal learning. This study examines eye-tracking as a useful and complementary tool in the assessment and improvement of implicit reading comprehension. The aim is to understand the role of…

Aim: The aim of the study was to examine longitudinal growth in intelligibility in connected speech from 2 to 8 years of age in children with cerebral palsy. Method: Sixty-five children with cerebral palsy participated in the longitudinal study. Children were classified into speech-language profile groups using age-4 data: no speech motor…

This study examined whether the assessment of executive function (EF) added a unique contribution to second language (L2) reading comprehension in children in French immersion. Participants were 8- to 9-year old children who completed a collection of measures assessing French reading (i.e., word reading, decoding, and reading comprehension ) and…

Purpose: To date, research on effects of prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) has focused on a broad range of cognitive impairments, but relatively few studies have examined effects of PAE on development of reading skills. Although PAE has been linked to poorer reading comprehension, it remains unclear whether this impairment is attributable to…

This research analyzes data collected by the Young Lives project on childhood poverty. It addresses the effect of socio-demographic, individual, and linguistic variables -- focusing on the latter -- on reading comprehension in Spanish by 502 Peruvian Quechua-Spanish bilingual children aged 8 years. The regression model tested explained 46% of the…

Many middle-school students struggle with basic reading skills. One reason for this might be a lack of automaticity in word-level lexical processes. To investigate this, we used a novel backward masking paradigm, in which a written word is either covered with a mask or not. Participants (N = 444 [after exclusions]; n[subscript female] = 264,…

Listening comprehension (LC) is considered an important but complex skill that predicts later reading comprehension in various languages. In this study, we aimed at understanding the relationship of LC with different linguistic and cognitive components. For this purpose, 262 Arabic-speaking kindergartners participated in this study. Our regression…

The acquisition of vocabulary and narrative comprehension are key abilities for children's literacy development and to potentiate cognitive and academic skills from early ages. The aim with this study was to analyse the effects of a 6-week integrated active-lessons programme based on playful games, vocabulary, and narrative comprehension.…

Difficulties in monitoring reading comprehension result in poor comprehension. One key aspect of monitoring is metacomprehension, which refers to one's awareness of one's own reading comprehension. Previous studies have observed difficulties in metacomprehension among the deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) population. This study aims to determine…

Numerous studies on reading comprehension with monolingual children have shown that oral language, such as vocabulary, is an important factor in predicting reading comprehension success. However, few studies have looked at the reading comprehension performance of bilinguals, and less is known about the contributors to its success, linguistic or…

There is growing recognition of the need to end the debate regarding reading instruction in favor of an approach that provides a solid foundation in phonics and other underlying language skills to become expert readers. We advance this agenda by providing evidence of specific effects of instruction focused primarily on the written code or on…

Background: Teaching vocabulary may be an effective way to address poor reading comprehension. However, it is unclear how many words or word families a school aged child with poor vocabulary would need to learn to meaningfully impact comprehension. This study provides estimates of vocabulary size for children with differing vocabulary achievement…