Fluent word recognition is an essential component of skilled reading, yet most children with reading difficulty have impaired word recognition. We developed and evaluated a web app, WordDriver, delivered via teletherapy, which targets phonological recoding to support orthographic learning and efficient word recognition. Participants were five…

Purpose: The probability of a child reading a word correctly is influenced by both child skills and properties of the word. The purpose of this study was to investigate child-level skills (set for variability and vocabulary), word-level properties (concreteness), word structure (mono- vs polymorphemic), and interactions between these properties…

Despite a marked increase in the volume of research investigating issues about reading interventions for students with ASD (e.g., Bailey and Arciuli, Rev J Autism Dev Disord 7(2):127-150, 2020; Chiang and Lin, Focus Autism Other Dev Disab 22(4):259-267, 2007), very few studies have examined the current reading practices experienced by children…

Skilled reading requires fast and accurate access to previously encountered words stored in memory. Yet, little research addresses skills that support such lexical access. Based on theoretical predictions, one skill that may support lexical access is orthographic knowledge. Thus, our goal was to investigate the relation between lexical access and…

Phonemic awareness is thought to be a causal factor predicting early reading acquisition while its influence diminishes as other reading skills develop. This is a descriptive study of 74, primarily African American, fifth- through eighth-grade students attending a small, inner-city school. The study sought to determine the relationship between…

Research consistently documents that girls outperform boys in literacy achievement, yet, when considering the starting point--early literacy--we do not have consensus on the origin, meaningful nature, or persistence of such differences. In this two-part study analyzing 5,816 Norwegian students (48.1% girls, average age of 6.1 years), we first…

We modeled word reading growth in typically developing (n = 118) and children with dyslexia (n = 20), Grades 2-5, across multiple exposures to 30 words. We explored the facilitative versus inhibitory effects of exposures to differential mixes of words that support high- versus low-frequency vowel pronunciations. One training corpus contained a…

Purpose: We investigated the roles of leisure reading and word reading ability in vocabulary and reading comprehension development in 598 adolescents at ages 10, 11, and 12 (285 girls, 313 boys). Method: Structural equation modeling was used to test whether word reading was associated with vocabulary and reading comprehension: a) directly; b)…

This study investigated the presence of word reading difficulties in a sample of students in Grades 1-4 (n = 357) identified with language and reading comprehension difficulties. This study also examined whether distinct word reading and listening comprehension profiles emerged within this sample and the extent to which these groups varied in…

Adolescents with reading disability (RD) participated in a randomized controlled trial evaluating the efficacy of a multiple-component reading intervention with motivational components (PHAST). A total of 514 youth in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade formed instructional groups (4-8) that were randomly assigned to one of three conditions--one of two PHAST…

This research compared the contributions of lexical inferencing, decoding, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL) enrolled in university bridging programs in the U.S. and Chinese-speaking university learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China.…

This paper addresses a gap in research regarding the efficacy of software programs to help children with reading difficulties. Forty-two children aged 5-13 years identified as poor readers participated in a study over twelve weeks using ReadingDoctor, a software program targeting phonemic awareness, orthographic-phonemic mappings, decoding ability…