The undeniable importance of reading in higher education prompted this investigation into the reading skills of a group often overlooked in previous research: master's level students studying in English-medium instruction (EMI) environments. Participants (148 master's-level students of engineering) completed the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (Form G),…

Background: Previous research has shown positive effects of Omega 3/6 fatty acids in children with inattention and reading difficulties. We aimed to investigate if Omega 3/6 improved reading ability in mainstream schoolchildren. Methods: We performed a 3-month parallel, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial followed by 3-month active…

An eye-tracking study with 60 native Swedish speakers (18-30 years) was conducted to investigate the positive effects on learning outcomes predicted by the disfluency effect. Subtle low-pass filtering was used as a disfluency manipulation and compared with a control condition using regular text. The text was presented on four separate text…

The purpose of this study was (i) to investigate if the compensatory effect of text-to-speech (TTS) technology on reading comprehension and reading rate in schoolchildren with reading disability is influenced by problems with inattention and hyperactivity and (ii) to examine whether a potentially moderating effect of such symptoms differ between…

The present response time study investigated how a hypothesized time-based working memory constraint of 2-3 s affects the resolution of grammatical and semantic dependencies. Congruent and incongruent object relative (OR) and subject relative sentences were read at different presentation rates so that the distance between dependent words was…

The aim of this study was to examine the performance of fifth-grade children in the reproduction of the content of a new text directly after they had read it (immediate recall) and one week later (delayed recall), as well as to investigate the relationship between performance, self-reported memory strategies, and working memory capacity (WMC). The…

Although phonemic awareness is a well-known factor predicting early reading development, there is also evidence that Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) is an independent factor that contributes to early reading. The aim of this study is to examine phonemic awareness and RAN as predictors of reading speed, reading comprehension and spelling for…

An intensive phonics-based intervention program for nine-year-old Swedish pupils with reading difficulties was performed. Pupils (N = 112) were randomly assigned to either an intervention or a control group. The training was tailored to the Swedish transparent orthography and designed for one-to-one-tutoring during twelve weeks. Previously,…

A number of factors may affect student interaction in an asynchronous online discussion forum used in learning. This study deals with student preferences for the subject line of messages and in what ways the choice of subject line contributes to coherence and interaction reflected in the textual and interpersonal functions of the linguistic items…

By using latent profile analysis eight stable and interpretable subgroups of readers were identified. The basis for subgrouping was different performance measures with four aspects of reading in focus: reading of continuous texts, reading of document texts, word reading and reading speed. Participants were 9-year-old Swedish students included in…

The study investigates measurement properties of the reading assessment tasks used in the IEA 1991 Reading Literacy (RL) study and the Progress in International Readings Study (PIRLS) 2001 study. The analysis is based on data from the Swedish PIRLS study, comprising 16,676 students in grades 3 and 4. As an extension to the basic design, not only…