Background: Readability metrics provide us with an objective and efficient way to assess the quality of educational texts. We can use the readability measures for finding assessment items that are difficult to read for a given grade level. Hard-to-read math word problems can put some students at a disadvantage if they are behind in their literacy…

This is the second in series of studies designed to test direct and conditional effects of embedded cognitive practice in phonics instruction. Students identified in winter of kindergarten with minimal alphabet knowledge were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: explicit phonics (Plain) (n = 28) or explicit phonics with embedded cognitive…

This is the second in series of studies designed to test direct and conditional effects of embedded cognitive practice in phonics instruction. Students identified in winter of kindergarten with minimal alphabet knowledge were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: explicit phonics (Plain) (n = 28) or explicit phonics with embedded cognitive…

Parent-child reading critically affects children's learning and development, and dialog reading (DR) is a highly effective strategy for parent-child reading. This study employed the prompt, expand, evaluate, and repeat (PEER) DR strategy to develop a picture book incorporating augmented reality (AR) technology. AR information is extracted from the…

We examined the relation between home literacy environment (HLE), parents' reading skills, and children's emergent literacy skills (pinyin letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and vocabulary) and reading (word reading and reading comprehension) in a sample of 168 Chinese children (M[subscript age] = 74.26 months) followed from kindergarten to…

This study investigated direct and indirect pathways from listening comprehension (LC) to reading comprehension (RC) via fluent word reading (FWR) in grades 1-3, and path equivalence across these grades. LC's total effects predicting RC range from 0.45 to 0.59 in grades 1-3, a stronger relationship than found in previous studies. Overall, LC's…

Since 2012, when preparatory grade (PG) became compulsory in Romania for 6-year olds, little understanding has been gained of how children's literacy evolves in PG, although over the same period, Romanian 15-year olds' reading performance has shown no signs of improvement (Noveanu et al., 2023). Children enter school with broadly varying literacy…

The script relativity hypothesis proposes that the scripts we read and write affect our cognition. The current study tested this hypothesis by comparing Chinese and English cognitive-linguistic skills and three cognitive abilities, including verbal working memory capacity, nonverbal IQ, and arithmetic calculation, across groups of children with…

Holistic processing has been identified as an expertise marker of face and object recognition. By contrast, reduced holistic processing is purportedly an expertise marker in recognising orthographic characters in Chinese. Does holistic processing increase or decrease in expertise development? Is orthographic recognition a domain-specific exception…

The current study investigated perceptual simulation and its relationship with literacy ability in Chinese children. Ninety-three third-grade Hong Kong Chinese children completed a sentence-picture verification task for perceptual simulation. In this task, a sentence mentioning an object was presented first, followed by a picture involving the…

Purpose: We examined whether affix type and base word transparency explained variation in third- through sixth-grade students' performance on a number of morphological awareness tasks. Method: Third- through sixth-grade students (n > 500 at each grade) completed morphological awareness tasks from the Morphological Awareness Test for Reading and…

In this study, we investigated the direct and indirect associations of different cognitive-linguistic skills and Chinese reading comprehension in Hong Kong kindergarteners. We assessed 179 children's nonverbal IQ, cognitive-linguistic skills, word reading, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension. Results showed significant correlations…

Purpose: This 2-year longitudinal study examined the unique prediction of a dynamic assessment (DA) of character decoding on Chinese early reading development, and further explored whether learning potential, as assessed by DA, predicts subsequent character reading development in a sample of 135 native Mandarin-speaking Chinese students from first…

Background: Visual-spatial attention is associated with reading development, but we do not know whether this is primarily driven by the deployment of goal-directed or stimulus-driven attention. Method: One hundred ninety-four Chinese-speaking first graders completed two visual search tasks, in which they searched for a target among a number of…

Background: Text comprehension research in relation to the reading medium showed that digital-based reading represents a disadvantage compared with paper-based reading. Most paper versus screen research; however, was conducted with university students. Objectives: This study investigated the contribution of reading medium to text comprehension and…