Although research has established that performance on a rapid automatized naming (RAN) task is related to reading, the nature of this relationship is unclear. Bowers (2001) proposed that processes underlying performance on the RAN task and orthographic knowledge make independent and additive contributions to reading performance. We examined the…

English language predictors of English and French reading development were investigated in a group of 140 children who were enrolled in French immersion programs. Children were first tested in kindergarten, and their reading achievement was tested yearly in both English and French from Grades 1 to 3, with word-level and passage-level measures that…

Word reading fluency, as indexed by the fast and accurate identification of single words, predicts both general reading ability and reading comprehension. This study compared the effects of context training and isolated word training on subsequent measures of word reading fluency. Good and poor readers were given 12 repetitions of two sets of…

Examined relations among phonological awareness, music perception skills, and early reading skills in 100 preschoolers. Found that music skills correlated significantly with both phonological awareness and reading development. Music perception skills contributed unique variance in predicting reading ability, even when variance due to phonological…

Details two experiments examining transfer effects across contextual and linguistic boundaries with poor readers. Concludes that non-fluent readers do not completely integrate surface characteristics (words) and the message of the text. Word-level representations remain free to support transfer across various processing episodes. Maintains that a…

Examined three factors that influence rereading transfer in children: story relatedness, reading ability, text difficulty. In four experiments, elementary school students read pairs of texts related by word overlap, content overlap, both kinds of overlap, or no overlap at all. Extent to which children benefited from word or content overlap…

Trained fast- and slow-namer groups of poor-reading second graders to read words using different training regimes. Found that slow namers were particularly disadvantaged compared to fast namers when trained with word-level units. Children showed poorer retention following onset/rime training compared to other types. They showed the best…

Two studies with poor readers in grade 4 (total N=68) examined the relationship between word identification speed and story reading fluency. Benefits were found for single-word practice prior to reading stories containing those words, even for children who were particularly poor namers. Results are related to theoretical links between fluency and…