Background: We examined the influence of text and reader characteristics on sixth graders' inference generation. Methods: Eleven- to 12-year-old US monolingual English speakers (N = 71) and Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 81) read narrative and informational expository texts requiring an inference and answered an inference-tapping question after…

Purpose: This study examined language group differences in English syntactic knowledge based on performance on a sentence repetition task. Method: Fourth and sixth grade students who were monolinguals (n = 30), early bilinguals (i.e., simultaneous; n = 27), or late bilinguals (i.e., sequential; n = 29) completed an English sentence repetition…

Purpose: Despite the unprecedented growth of Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs) in new destination states--where DLLs have not been historically served--empirical understanding of their language and literacy skills is scant. Drawing on scientific understandings of bilingual language acquisition, we compare monolingually scored and…

Purpose: Math word problem solving, a form of reading comprehension, is complicated by mathematical lexical ambiguity (e.g., the word "difference" can mean "dissimilarity" in everyday discourse but "the answer in a subtraction problem" in math). This study examined the role of mathematical lexical ambiguity in math…

Environmental sources of variance in the Italian vocabulary and reading skills of bilingual primary school children from immigrant families (or language minority bilingual children (LMBC)) in Italy were investigated, and the LMBC's skill levels were compared to those of their monolingual classmates. A total of 140 children from the first, third,…

This study investigated whether weakness in using morphological analysis to infer new word meanings during reading is a source of poor text comprehension and the relative importance of psycholinguistic and cognitive factors as contributors of poor text comprehension in English-only and English language learners. Thirty-seven poor comprehenders and…

This study examines young English readers' ability to infer word meanings in context and to use metacognitive knowledge for constructing word meanings in relation to their reading performance. The participants were 61 fourth-grade students in the United States, comprising 24 monolingual English-speaking (ME) students and 37…

Dual-language learner (DLL) children typically learn to write while still learning English, with vocabulary appearing to be a particularly vulnerable domain. This study investigates how a reduced English lexicon impacts English writing in DLL children. Participants were 100 Spanish-speaking DLLs and 100 of their monolingual classmates in first…

This study examined teachers' language use across the school year in 6th grade urban middle-school classrooms (n = 24) and investigated the influence of this classroom-based linguistic input on the reading comprehension skills of the students (n = 851; 599 language minority learners and 252 English-only) in the participating classrooms. Analysis…