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…

Background noise challenges auditory recognition of speech and may reveal the underlying deficits in auditory word recognition skills. Previous studies have reported an association between children's auditory skills and various linguistic skills, including phonology, although in some languages only. However, language-specific features influence…

Purpose: Morphological regularities are an important feature of the English writing system, and exposure to written morphology may be key in the development of skilled word recognition. Our aim was to investigate children's experiences of written morphology by analyzing a large-scale corpus of children's reading materials spanning a target age…

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…

Purpose: Talkers often modify their speech when communicating with individuals who struggle to understand speech, such as listeners with hearing loss. This study evaluated the benefit of clear speech in school-age children and adults with normal hearing for speech-in-noise and speech-in-speech recognition. Method: Masked sentence recognition…

This study describes the features of words known and unknown by first graders of different proficiency levels in six instances of an oral reading fluency assessment: three in winter and three in spring. A sample of 411 students was placed into four groups (very high, high, middle, and low) based on their median correct words per minute in spring.…

This project explores how children disambiguate and retain novel object-label mappings in the face of semantic similarity. Burgeoning evidence suggests that semantic structure in the developing lexicon promotes word learning in ostensive contexts, whereas other findings indicate that semantic similarity interferes with and temporarily slows…

Children learning language efficiently process single words and activate semantic, phonological, and other features of words during recognition. We investigated lexical recognition in deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) to determine how perceiving language in the visual-spatial modality affects lexical recognition. Twenty native…

Common tests of morphological awareness measure both morphology and syntax by requiring participants to fit words and pseudowords into sentences by adding or removing affixes. We report the results of a study testing a new word level task. College students viewed transparent words (without phonological or orthographic shifts) and used a keyboard…

Mandarin requires neither determiners nor morphological inflections, which casts doubt on Mandarin-speaking children's ability to use function words as a syntactic bootstrapping tool to identify the form class of a new word. This study examined 3- and 5-year-old Mandarin learners' ability to use function words to interpret new words as either…

There is now considerable evidence regarding the types of interventions that are effective at remediating reading disabilities on average. It is generally unclear, however, what predicts the magnitude of individual-level change following a given intervention. We examine new predictors of intervention gains that are theoretically grounded in…

To address the needs of a diverse group of students with reading difficulties, a majority of researchers over the last decade have designed and implemented multicomponent reading interventions (MCRIs) that provide instruction in multiple areas of reading yielding mixed results. The current study evaluates whether students' baseline word reading…

Several previous studies showed that prime-target pairs with orthographical overlap but no semantic or morphological relationship (e.g., freeze-free) produced a masked priming effect in second language (L2) speakers but not in first language (L1) speakers. The present study further explored this intriguing L1-L2 difference by comparing English…

A randomized feasibility trial of a parent coaching (PC) intervention was conducted across 16 community agencies in a Canadian province. Parents of toddlers with suspected autism were assigned to either a PC group (n = 24) or an enhanced community treatment (ECT) group (n = 25). PC participants received 24 weeks of coaching support from community…