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…

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…

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 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…

Purpose: Previous studies examining the inter-relations between serial and discrete naming with reading have found that the ability to efficiently process multiple items presented in a sequence (indexed by serial naming) is a unique predictor of word- and text-reading fluency. However, conclusions have been tempered by the concurrent nature of the…

Nearly 30 years ago, Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin (1990) introduced the "fourth-grade slump" to describe the unexpected deceleration of reading skills between first and fourth grades among children growing up in poverty and low-income households. Advances in our understanding of reading development and how race, racism, or other forms of…

Nearly 30 years ago, Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin introduced the fourth-grade slump to describe the unexpected deceleration of reading skills between first and fourth grades among children growing up in poverty and low-income households. Advances in our understanding of reading development and how race, racism, or other forms of discrimination are…

Learning to decode is critically important to the process of becoming literate. As such, a thorough understanding of decoding development is critical as well. Extant theories contribute to such an understanding but do not provide a complete description of decoding development; a different theory is needed to address limitations in the extant…

We investigated the stability and developmental interplay of word reading and spelling in samples of Swedish (N = 191) and U.S. children (N = 489) followed across four time points: end of kindergarten, grades 1, 2, and 4. Cross-lagged path models revealed that reading and spelling showed moderate to strong autoregressive effects, with reading…

Orthographic knowledge is predicted to be central in the process of children's reading development. We examined both the temporal order between orthographic knowledge and each of word reading and word spelling--effectively, which predicts which by including autoregressive controls--and cross-linguistic transfer between English and French for our…

Statistical views of reading highlight the link between proficient literacy and the assimilation of various regularities embedded in writing systems, including those in the mapping between print and meaning. Still, orthographic-semantic (O-S) regularities remain relatively understudied, with open questions regarding 3 issues: (a) how O-S…