Inferencing skills uniquely contribute to the reading comprehension skills of older grade-school and college students. Evidence also suggests that children's reading component skills, such as decoding and language comprehension, differentially contribute to various reading comprehension assessments. However, additional research is needed to…

We examined the relationship between two metalinguistic tasks: prosodic awareness and punctuation ability. Specifically, we investigated whether adults' ability to punctuate was related to the degree to which they are aware of and able to manipulate prosody in spoken language. English-speaking adult readers (n = 115) were administered a receptive…

This study was designed to examine the effects of an intervention program aimed at improving reading, spelling, and vocabulary skills through linguistically explicit instruction in morphological awareness. Sixteen children, diagnosed with language impairment, participated in this study. Instruction for the experimental group focused on increasing…

Poor comprehenders have intact word-reading skills but struggle specifically with understanding what they read. We investigated whether two metalinguistic skills, morphological and syntactic awareness, are specifically related to poor reading comprehension by including separate and combined measures of each. We identified poor comprehenders…

Despite substantial correlational evidence of a relationship between morphological awareness and reading ability, there has been only limited intervention research conducted to document the effects of morphological awareness on various literacy outcomes, particularly reading comprehension, and almost no research comparing the relative…

An experiment examined whether metalinguistic awareness involving the detection of semantic ambiguity can be taught, and whether this instruction improves students' reading comprehension. Lower SES third graders from a variety of cultural backgrounds (M = 8 yr. 7 mo., N = 46) were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Those receiving…

This study was designed to determine the contributions of metalinguistic skill and psycholinguistic processing ability to children's ability to detect the ambiguity of sentences and the relationship among all three factors to early reading ability. A total of 20 first graders and 20 second graders were given tasks testing the following abilities:…