It is widely recognized that individuals with dyslexia have difficulties with word reading and spelling, and individuals with reading comprehension difficulties have low vocabulary knowledge. However, little is known about the extent to which spelling and vocabulary are informative of reading difficulties. In the present study, we investigated…

Background: Spelling is a prevalent strategy to teach children to read. However, research on the mechanism underlying the contribution of spelling to reading comprehension in Chinese children is limited. Methods: The primary aim of this study was to investigate the concurrent and longitudinal associations between spelling and reading comprehension…

Reading performance in third grade has significantly declined across the United States in recent years, suggesting a critical problem that was addressed in this study. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore the perspectives of K-3 teachers working in a rural elementary school district regarding a decline since 2018 in the…

Definitions of dyslexia typically make reference to unexpected poor reading, although how best to operationalize unexpected remains an issue. When operationally defined as reading below expectations based on the level of oral language, cases of unexpected poor reading make up fewer than half of cases of poor reading, and cases of unexpected poor…

Purpose: Oral narrative, or storytelling, skills may constitute a linguistic strength for African American children, with implications for academic and social well-being. Despite this possibility, few studies have examined individual differences in oral narrative skill among African American children. To address this gap in the literature, this…

In early Finnish reading instruction, hyphens are used to denote syllable boundaries. However, this practice slows down reading already during the 1st grade. It has been hypothesized that hyphenation forces readers to rely more on phonology than orthography. Since hyphenation highlights the phonology of the word, it may facilitate reading during…

This study examined how teachers and paraprofessionals in 126 kindergarten-second grade general and special education classrooms talked with their 194 students with autism, and further, how individual student characteristics in language, autism symptoms, and social abilities influenced this talk. Using systematic observational methods and factor…

This study focused on the phonological awareness skills of 72 Spanish-English and 86 Cantonese-English bilinguals, all enrolled in bilingual and mainstream classrooms in the same schools. Bilinguals were assessed on phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary, and knowledge of book reading each year from kindergarten until second grade.…

Purpose: This study examines the extent to which the Home Literacy Environment (HLE) as measured by reading habits and resources, library use, and subscriptions or materials, as well as parental reading beliefs predict both language skills (i.e., vocabulary) at kindergarten and students' trajectories of growth from kindergarten (K) to grade 3…

Many primary grade students are not afforded nonfiction-rich opportunities, with fiction comprising the majority of books read aloud in classrooms. With the Common Core Standards recommending that half of the texts made available to students be nonfiction, educators are increasing their use of informational text. The present study explored the…

We examined the predictive value of early spelling for later reading performance by analyzing data from 970 U.S. children whose spelling was assessed in the summer following the completion of kindergarten (M age = 6 years; 3 months). The word reading performance of most of the children was then tested after the completion of Grade 1 (age 7;5),…

Though a number of language socialization processes are theorized to promote children's heritage language proficiency (HLP), little research has considered these processes in a single study and examined their prospective relations to multiple domains of HLP in school-age children. In a two-wave longitudinal study of Chinese American children of…

Cognate awareness is the ability to recognize the cognate relationship between words in two etymologically related languages. The current study examined the development of cognate awareness and its contribution to French (second language) reading comprehension among Canadian French immersion children. Eighty-one students were tested at the end of…

Lervag and Hulme’s neuro-developmental theory and Wolf and Bowers’s double-deficit hypothesis were examined in this longitudinal study. A total of 130 children were tested in preschool and followed through fifth grade, when 84 remained in the study. During preschool and kindergarten the participants were given tests of end-sound discrimination…

Purpose: This archival study examined the relationship between the speech sound production skill of kindergarten children and literacy outcomes in Grades 1-3 in a data set where most children's vocabulary skills were within normal limits, speech therapy was not provided until 2nd grade, and phonological awareness instruction was discouraged at the…