Cross-sectional studies have shown the connections between oral language, reading, and writing skills, but there has been limited longitudinal research, especially in primary school. This study examined the relationships between oral narrative, reading, and writing skills in a longitudinal sample of 80 Italian-speaking primary school children…

The automatization of handwriting and typing is sustained by both sensorimotor and linguistic abilities that support the integration of central-linguistic processes with modality-specific peripheral-motor programs. How this integration evolves when handwriting and, especially, typing is not fully automatized has not been well-understood yet. In…

A central objective of schooling processes at the international level is reading skills development. Unfortunately, many students in the European Union underperform at this, and these low performances can be more pronounced in countries with lower Human Development Index (HDI) values. This study analysed the contextual effect of school…

Letters and numbers are different domains, and their differentiation increases with schooling. It has nonetheless been argued that reading alphabetic and numerical materials partly involves the same processes, even in adults. Whether individuals with dyslexia have difficulty reading and writing numbers remains to be established. This study…

This study aims to identify the literacy skills of individuals whose highest level of education was in the field 'teacher training and educational sciences'. The study sample comprised 10,618 individuals in the field of teacher training and educational sciences, selected from 31 countries (participating in the International Adult Skills Assessment…

The role of children's receptive vocabulary knowledge in word and nonword reading (decoding) in an orthographically transparent language is debated. Moreover, we have little understanding of how the role of vocabulary might differ between monolingual children and bilingual children from immigrant families (or language minority bilingual children…

Limited longitudinal studies have explored the development of reading, along with its predictors, in a language characterized by shallow orthography and a simple syllabic structure. In a 5-year longitudinal study, we investigated the development of reading skills in 327 Italian-speaking children (male: n = 180, 55%) from Grade 1 (mean age = 6.16 ±…

Several studies have demonstrated the role of narrative competence in predicting later academic achievement, but only a few authors tried to highlight exact relationships between the different aspects of these two complex domains. The main aim of the present work was to investigate this association considering the micro- and macrostructural levels…

Emerging evidence suggests that the combination of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and reading training may provide promising benefits for dyslexia; however, the clinical effects and the role of individual differences in tDCS outcomes for dyslexia remain unclear. To this end, the present study investigated the effects of tDCS on…

Few of previous reading studies "comprehensively" examined the contributing factors of students' digital reading literacy. To fill this gap, based upon the ecological perspective, this study aims to investigate which factors from the student, home, and school context are more important in discriminating high-performing digital readers…

Previous studies have showed that early problems with word decoding can lead to poor performance in text reading and comprehension and suggest that poor readers often struggle with reading deficits throughout their school years. Therefore, early detection of those children who are at risk for slow reading development and/or who belong to the…

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) has long been thought to be determined by multiple components. Dyscalculia has high comorbidity with other learning and developmental disabilities, including reading and writing disorders, attention deficits, and problems in visual/spatial skills, short memory, and working memory. This study aims to assess prevalence…

Students' attainment in mathematics is associated with several personal and contextual factors, but little research has been carried out to explore the intersectionality between them. The current paper aims to fill this gap. Census assessment data collected in Italy at Grade 10 (on average, 15-year-old students) by the Italian national institute…

This study compared language minority bilingual (LMB) second graders with two groups of monolingual peers (with comparable low SES or with high SES) in a set of literacy skills (reading fluency, spelling, reading and oral comprehension) tested in the target school language (L2 for bilinguals). The aim was to disentangle the roles of bilingualism…

Environmental sources of variance in the Italian vocabulary and reading skills of bilingual primary school children from immigrant families (or language minority bilingual children (LMBC)) in Italy were investigated, and the LMBC's skill levels were compared to those of their monolingual classmates. A total of 140 children from the first, third,…