Listening comprehension involves the ability to understand and extract meaning from spoken sentences, stories, and instruction. This skill is vital for young children and has long-term effects on school achievement, employability, income, and participation in society. There is a lack of measures of young children's listening comprehension skills.…

The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between a number of cognitive abilities (auditory/visual attention, processing speed, and fluid intelligence) and listening comprehension. A total of 97 undergraduate EFL students participated in the study. Tests of auditory and visual attention, processing speed, verbal and nonverbal fluid…

Word semantic knowledge (WSK) is crucial to the development of one's reading comprehension ability. A total of 608 students (208 poor readers in the experimental group and 200 poor readers in the control group one, and 200 typical readers in control group 2) from grade 4 participated in this study. Selected reading ability assessments were…

Despite the important role assigned to analogical reasoning (AR) in cognition and language, the relationship between this ability and language skills in the emergent literacy period has not been sufficiently studied, especially in Spanish speakers. To explore this link, we examined two modalities of AR (verbal and non-verbal) as predictors of…

Oral language abilities have been reported to be related to reading development. This relationship seems to be determined by orthographic systems and reading development. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show reading difficulties, although most studies focus on reading comprehension. The present study has two main objectives: to…

Phonological coding plays an important role in reading for hearing students. Experimental findings regarding phonological coding in deaf readers are controversial, and whether deaf readers are able to use phonological coding remains unclear. In the current study we examined whether Chinese deaf students could use phonological coding during…

This study reports on the effects of a 1-year parental involvement intervention on reading development of primary school children. The intervention included a teacher and parent training, focusing on teacher-parent communication and parental involvement in homework and reading at home. We used a cluster randomized controlled trial design with…

Studies examining the visual and verbal metaphorical comprehension of individuals with non-specific intellectual disability (NSID) are remarkably scarce; to date only one case study examined comprehension of metaphors in an individual with Down syndrome (DS). The current study explored both the understanding of conventional and novel metaphors and…

Acquisition of oral English verb morphology presents difficulties for bilinguals, learners of EFL and English-speaking monolingual children with specific language impairment. This study aimed to identify challenging English verb inflections among sixth grade speakers of Arabic (N = 85) and Hebrew (N = 86) using an elicited oral narrative task, and…

This study investigates the derivation of scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties (RD). Twenty-four children with RD (mean age 9 years and 8 months), 20 age-matched typical readers (mean age 9 years and 10 months), 20 six-year-old children and 20 five-year-old children were tested with the comprehension of sentences with…

The present study evaluated the extent to which literacy skills (reading fluency, written spelling, and reading comprehension), together with nonverbal reasoning, prior knowledge, and gender, are related to students' online research and comprehension (ORC) performance. The ORC skills of 426 sixth graders were measured using a Finnish adaptation of…

This study had three main aims. First, we examined to what extent listening comprehension, vocabulary, grammatical skills and verbal short-term memory (VSTM) assessed prior to formal reading instruction explained individual differences in early reading comprehension levels. Second, we examined to what extent the three common component skills,…

This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject- and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12;11) with that…

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a heterogeneous disorder affecting various aspects of language. While most studies have investigated impairments in the domain of syntax and morphosyntax, little is known about compositional semantics and the process of deriving pragmatic meanings in SLI. We selected a group of sixteen monolingual…

Background: In this work we sought to expand our knowledge of developmental trajectories of subcomponents of the language systems of individuals with intellectual disability (ID). We aimed to explore how "general" and "relational" vocabularies evolve as a function of cognitive level. Method: Developmental trajectories of…