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…

Individual differences in reading performance between children appear from the onset of literacy acquisition. One possible explanation for this variability is the influence of inhibition in reading ability, a topic that has received very little research attention. Nevertheless, children often make guessing errors characterized by replacing a word…

Purpose: Fourth grade typically involves shifting the instruction from "learning to read" to "reading to learn," which can cause students to struggle. However, early reading intervention guided by assessment has demonstrated effectiveness in preventing later reading difficulties (RD). This study presents a classification and…

Background: Arabic is recognised as diglossic; one manifestation of diglossia is the co-existence of two varieties of the language used in different social settings: standard (or literary) Arabic (StA) and spoken Arabic (SpA). The study investigated the impact of lexical-phonological distance in Arabic (identical, cognate, unique, which are…

The present study was conducted to explore how the relationships between reading comprehension constructs change according to word reading accuracy, as measured in a large convenience sample (n = 857) of school-aged students (Years 3-6) with reading difficulties. Multiple regression analyses containing interaction variables were conducted, to…

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…

The present study examined the strategies used by Greek novice readers in the initial phases of reading acquisition. Fifty (50) children were assessed at four successive testing periods throughout 1st grade of Primary School. Thus, 21 boys (42%) and 29 girls (58%) participated in this study. Their mean age at the beginning of the study was 74.43…

The development of emergent literacy, a precursor to formal reading, has been linked to subsequent conventional literacy skills in Chinese children. The factors important for acquiring Chinese reading skills, such as phonological and morphological awareness, have primarily been studied in primary school children rather than preschoolers. The…

The transition from sounding out unfamiliar words to effortlessly reading connected text does not occur all at once nor at the same rate for students. The purpose of this study was to explore the accuracy of three decision rules (data point, median, and trend line) applied to progress monitoring outcomes of alphabetic principle (nonsense word…

The transition from sounding out unfamiliar words to effortlessly reading connected text does not occur all at once or at the same rate for students. The purpose of this study was to explore the accuracy of three decision rules (data point, median, and trend line) applied to progress monitoring outcomes of alphabetic principle (nonsense word…

Although there is a growing research base on Arabic literacy development to inform our understanding of the factors that account for variability in word reading skill, the current body of research is limited by two major constraints. First, although several studies examine one or more early literacy constructs, we were able to locate only two…

This study aimed to examine (a) the developing interrelations between the efficiency of reading individually presented words (i.e., isolated word recognition speed) and the efficiency of reading multiword sequences (i.e., word list and text reading fluency); (b) whether serial digit naming, indexing the ability to process multi-item sequences,…

Research consistently documents that girls outperform boys in literacy achievement, yet, when considering the starting point--early literacy--we do not have consensus on the origin, meaningful nature, or persistence of such differences. In this two-part study analyzing 5,816 Norwegian students (48.1% girls, average age of 6.1 years), we first…

The purpose of this follow-up study was to determine the specific contribution of phonological processing abilities, including phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN) and verbal short-term memory (VSTM), as well as visual perception (VP), in word reading accuracy. A sample of 62 native Arabic speaking children from Grade 1…

We modeled word reading growth in typically developing (n = 118) and children with dyslexia (n = 20), Grades 2-5, across multiple exposures to 30 words. We explored the facilitative versus inhibitory effects of exposures to differential mixes of words that support high- versus low-frequency vowel pronunciations. One training corpus contained a…