The present study examined whether and how early cognitive flexibility, metalinguistic awareness, including phonological awareness (PA) and morphological awareness (MA), Chinese word reading (CWR), and listening comprehension (LC) influenced Chinese children's later reading comprehension. In total, 153 Chinese children were recruited. Path…

Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to reflect on and process the sounds of spoken language and to conduct mental operations on the units that represent them, that is, phonemes. This study intended to examine the descriptive and psychometric properties of the phonemic awareness of schoolers test assessment (PASTA), a new tool that assesses…

Purpose: Children progress from making grapheme-phoneme connections to making grapho-syllabic connections before whole-word connections during reading development (Ehri, 2005a). More is known about the development of grapheme--phoneme connections than is known about grapho-syllabic connections. Therefore, we explored the trajectory of syllable use…

Discrimination of reversible mirrored letters (e.g., d and b) poses a challenge when learning to read as it requires overcoming "mirror invariance," an evolutionary-old perceptual tendency of processing mirror images as equivalent. The present study investigated "when," in reading development, mirror-image discrimination…

When using response to intervention (RTI) for special education eligibility decisions, multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) may use performance level and rate of improvement (ROI) as two metrics when evaluating student responsiveness. Although examining student responsiveness to instruction is a critical component of an evaluation using RTI, previous…

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…

Foreign language anxiety has influenced reading achievement in English as a second language learning (ESL). However, less is known about how foreign language anxiety affects Chinese students learning English as L2 and the interplay between foreign language anxiety and cognitive-linguistic factors on L2 reading performance. This longitudinal study…

The sentence superiority effect observed with skilled adult readers has been taken to reflect parallel processing of word identities and the rapid construction of a preliminary syntactic structure. Here we examined if such processing is already present in primary school children in Grade 3 (average age 8.9 years). Children saw sequences of four…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine if word reading and vocabulary are reciprocally related. Method: We followed a sample of 172 English-speaking Canadian children (82 girls, 90 boys; M[subscript age] = 75.87 months at the first measurement point) from the beginning of Grade 1 until the beginning of Grade 3 and assessed them three…

Background: Rapid automatised naming (RAN) has been found to predict children's reading and arithmetic abilities. However, the underlying mechanisms for its involvement in the two abilities are not clear. This study examines how RAN shared variances with domain-general and domain-specific abilities in predicting reading and arithmetic in Chinese…

The purpose of this feasibility study was to examine the potential impact of reading digital interactive e-books, Word Knowledge e-books (WKe-Books), on essential skills that support reading comprehension with third-fifth grade students. Students (N= 425) read two WKe-Books, that taught word learning and comprehension monitoring strategies in the…

Previous studies indicate that children are exposed to different literacy experiences at home. Although these disparities have been shown to affect children's literacy skills, it remains unclear whether and how home literacy practices influence brain activity underlying word-level reading. In the present study, we asked parents of French children…

The Common Core State Standards emphasize the need for U.S. students to read complex texts. As a result, the level of word complexity for primary-level texts is important, particularly the dimensions of and changes in complexity between first grade and the important third-grade high-stakes testing year. In this study, we addressed word complexity…

Automation of frequently used words is a key component in the development of reading fluency. However, acquiring fast word recognition skills is a serious challenge for many children in their early years of formal education. Lagging word recognition leads to general reading problems, as fluency is a vital prerequisite for text comprehension.…

The increasing number of students who lack proficient reading skills is well known in Germany, as well as globally. Students with learning disabilities (LD), problem behavior, and German as a second language (L2) may face even greater hurdles. However, it is essential for teachers to provide adequate support to maintain equal educational…