Recent research suggests that visual-verbal paired associate learning (PAL) may tap a crossmodal associative learning mechanism that plays a distinct role in reading development. However, evidence from children with dyslexia indicates that deficits in visual-verbal PAL are strongly linked to the verbal demands of the task. The primary aim of this…

Previous research has suggested that children with specific reading comprehension deficits (poor comprehenders) show an impaired ability to suppress irrelevant information from working memory, with this deficit detrimentally impacting on their working memory ability, and consequently limiting their reading comprehension performance. However, the…

Background: Poor comprehenders are children who show significant deficits in their reading comprehension performance, despite average, or above-average word reading ability. To date, there have been no in-depth studies of the mathematical performance profiles of such children. Aims: This study aimed to explore the mathematical profiles of poor…

This experiment examined the item-level relationship between 7-year-olds' ability to read words aloud and their knowledge of the same words in the oral domain. Two types of knowledge were contrasted: familiarity with the phonological form of the word (lexical phonology), measured by auditory lexical decision, and semantic knowledge, measured by a…

Using a word order correction paradigm, this study assessed syntactic awareness skills in children with good and poor reading comprehension, matched for age, decoding skill, and nonverbal ability. Poor comprehenders performed less well than normal readers, and the performance of both groups was influenced by the syntactic complexity and semantic…

Gives children (ages 5+ to 9+) four tests of phonological skill to investigate relationships between these measures and their predictive relationship with reading and spelling ability. Finds performance at phonemic segmentation, rhyme sound categorization, and alliteration sound categorization improved with age, but all groups performed onset-rime…

Two experiments investigated mechanisms underlying analogical transfer in the clue-reading task. It was concluded that the extent to which beginning readers make orthographic analogies is overestimated and that theories emphasizing orthographic analogy as a mechanism driving early reading development need reexamination. (Author/KB)

Two studies examined individual differences in 7- to 10-year-olds' contextual facilitation. Findings indicated that poor readers showed more contextual facilitation than good readers but the relative context benefit was greater for good readers. Comprehension was a better predictor of contextual facilitation that decoding. Dyslexics showed greater…