We examined whether word recognition accuracy and latency of words children encounter during primary school across the upper primary school grades can be predicted from word form (word length, mean Levenshtein distance, and mean frequency of neighbors), word meaning (free association network markers) and word exposure (corpus frequency and…

Enrichment programmes are designed to offer gifted students experiences that are not covered in the regular curriculum We used a pre-test-post-test control group design to examine the effects of a computer-based enrichment programme on the development of analytical and creative abilities in 26 gifted children in an experimental group (15 boys,…

Background: The present study examined patterns and predictors of reading comprehension growth in first language (L1) and second language (L2) readers in the upper grades of primary school. Previous research suggests that L1 and L2 readers differ in their growth trajectories and that differences in language proficiency play a role in this.…

In an experimental design, we investigated how fifth-grade readers use morphological and contextual information to infer the meaning of unknown words, and to what extent this is related to their cognitive and linguistic skills. A group of 166 fifth-grade Dutch children (59 L1, 107 L2) performed a lexical inferencing task in which the availability…

Word knowledge acquisition is an incremental process that relies on exposure. As a result, word knowledge can broadly range from recognizing the word's lexical status, to knowing its meaning in context, and to knowing its meaning independent of context. The present study aimed to model incremental word knowledge in 1454 upper primary school…

The present study investigated responsiveness to intervention in children with an earlier versus later diagnosis of dyslexia. We examined differences between second (n=122; early diagnosis) and third (n=158; late diagnosis) graders with dyslexia on reading and spelling abilities before, during and after a dyslexia intervention as well as in…

The current research investigated the effectiveness of a narrative intervention method aiming to improve oral narrative ability in 8- to 10-year-old children with developmental language disorder (DLD) (n = 6). Oral narrative ability was assessed through a narrative retelling and a narrative generation task of which both the narrative…

Background: The lexical quality hypothesis proposes that successful reading comprehension requires high quality lexical representations, which allow for efficient retrieval. These retrieval operations have however not been specified. Methods: We investigated the contribution of semantic retrieval to reading comprehension in 119 Dutch children in…

This study investigated in a longitudinal design how 74 Dutch children with dyslexia and 39 typically developing peers differed in sequential versus spatial implicit learning and overnight consolidation, and it examined whether implicit learning related to (pseudo)word reading development in Grades 5 and 6. The results showed that sequential, but…

We investigated pictorial versus contextual support effects over and above teaching of definitions on children's word learning and retention as well as the moderating role of reading comprehension. In a between-subject pre-post-retention test control group design, Dutch fourth graders learned concrete and abstract Dutch words. The context group…

We examined the response to a phonics through spelling intervention for children with developmental dyslexia in word and pseudoword reading efficiency and word spelling. Furthermore, we investigated to what extent the response to the intervention is robust across different cognitive profiles (phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and…

In the present study we investigated experimentation abilities of children with learning problems in early childhood education, i.e. kindergarten (4-6 years old). An essential part of science education is learning via the scientific method, of which experimentation is the central component. We studied experimentation abilities in 28 kindergartners…

We investigated the efficiency of briefly presenting word forms (visual dictation) over and above word copying in 5 computerized repeated spelling training sessions of Dutch rule-based and loan words in advanced spellers in primary school. Using repeated measures analyses of variance, we compared the effects of 2 spelling feedback conditions in a…

The present study aimed to examine the role of logical reasoning in the relation between lexical quality and reading comprehension in 146 fourth grade Dutch children. We assessed their standardized reading comprehension measure, along with their decoding efficiency and vocabulary as measures of lexical quality, syllogistic reasoning as measure of…

The present study aimed to explore the nature of developmental dyslexia in a language considered to have a transparent orthography, namely, Dutch. We assessed the accuracy and efficiency of decoding words and pseudowords with four lengths as well as three types of phonological ability in 2,760 typical children and 397 peers with dyslexia across…