Much of the evidence for morphological decomposition accounts of complex word identification has relied on the masked-priming paradigm. However, morphologically complex words are typically encountered in sentence contexts and processing begins before a word is fixated, when it is in the parafovea. To evaluate whether the single word-identification…

Background: Multiple perspectives on cognitive development, including Cattell's Investment Theory (1963, 1987), suggest that fluid reasoning (Gf) is foundational to the development of academic knowledge and skills. Yet little is known of the role that Gf may play in reading achievement, particularly in comparison with a larger literature…

Purpose: This study examined the effect of depressive symptoms on production and perception of conversational and clear speech (CS) sentences. Method: Five talkers each with high-depressive (HD) and low-depressive (LD) symptoms read sentences in conversational and clear speaking style. Acoustic measures of speaking rate, mean fundamental frequency…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of an 18-day summer tutoring program in which graduate student tutors delivered 15 minutes of differentiated reading instruction (DRI) and a 30-minute interactive read-aloud (IRA) lesson each day. Students in grades K-5 (N = 179) attending a summer program at one urban elementary school…

Purpose: Studies on reading in individuals with severe-to-profound hearing loss (deaf) raise the possibility that, due to deficient phonological coding, deaf individuals may rely more on orthographic-semantic links than on orthographic-phonological links. However, the relative contribution of phonological and semantic information to visual word…

Numerous studies have provided evidence that readers generate phonological codes while reading. However, a central question in much of this research has been how early these codes are generated. Answering this question has implications for the roles that phonological coding might play for skilled readers, especially whether phonological codes…

The hypothesis that known words can serve as anchors for discovering new words in connected speech has computational and empirical support. However, evidence for how the bootstrapping effect of known words interacts with other mechanisms of lexical acquisition, such as statistical learning, is incomplete. In 3 experiments, we investigated the…

Second language (L2) learners often speak with a strong accent, which can make them difficult to understand. However, familiarity with an accent enhances intelligibility. We propose that L2 learners are even more familiar with their own accented speech patterns and may thus understand self-produced L2 words better than others' accented…

Spelling errors are typically thought of as an "effect" of a word's weak orthographic representation in an individual mind. What if existence of spelling errors is a partial "cause" of effortful orthographic learning and word recognition? We selected words that had homophonic substandard spelling variants of varying frequency…

Working with a post-secondary student with intellectual disability, an adapted alternating treatments design was used to compare sight-word acquisition across three computer-delivered learning trial interventions: one with fixed 5-s response intervals, another with fixed 1-s response intervals, and a third with self-determined intervals. Visual…

This study investigated how well second language (L2) readers of English use context to identify proper names as such. It represents a first step in exploring a widely held assumption that L2 readers of English can easily identify proper names by their form and function. The study isolates the issue of function to investigate whether context alone…

The substantive component of construct validity requires a confrontation between empirical test results and content relevance. The Vocabulary Size Test (VST) has been extensively validated in terms of empirical results. Less is known, however, about expert judgments of content relevance. The VST was constructed and validated according to the…

For elementary learners of Japanese, one of the main difficulties in reading is to distinguish words written in kana. This paper reports on a survey of elementary level learners with two different levels of proficiency to investigate the effectiveness of Japanese graded readers with parts of speech color-coded to distinguish nouns, verbs,…

This study investigated how experience with a first language (L1) writing system affects the development of the second language (L2) word recognition subskills and how L2 linguistic knowledge constrains such L1 impacts. In this study, word recognition is conceptualized as a complex construct that entails multiple subskills necessary for…

In this study, we present a new diagnostic test for dyslexia, called the Flamingo Test, inspired by the French Alouette Test. The purpose of the test is to measure students' word decoding skills and reading fluency by means of a grammatically correct but meaningless text. Two experiments were run to test the predictive validity of the Flamingo…