Morphemes, the smallest meaning-bearing units of language, recur in many words. Therefore, morphological knowledge can facilitate the comprehension of novel words. This study tested the effectiveness of a morphological training program on children's learning and retention of exposed words and morphologically related unexposed words compared with…

The universal role of phonological processing skills for reading acquisition has been established in many different languages including Arabic. However, in Arabic little knowledge exists about the development of wide-range of phonological tasks and about the correlations between them. We longitudinally studied the developmental trends and…

Recent developments in English language teaching and learning have heightened the need for the use of tasks to foster second language (L2) learning. Central to task-based interaction is the repetition of the same task. Task repetition (TR) stimulates cognitive skills for speech learning and functionality. It has been emphasised in research and…

We examined the effects of an adaptive phonological training program on the enhancement of 3 processing abilities--namely, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and phonological short-term memory--as well as word and pseudoword reading in Arabic-speaking children with dyslexia. We compared an experimental group (n = 20; mean age =…

The purpose of this article is to question the suitability of the phonics screening check in relation to models and theories of reading development. The article questions the appropriateness of the check by drawing on theoretical frameworks which underpin typical reading development. I examine the Simple View of Reading developed by Gough and…

The study explored the inflectional morphological awareness of Greek-speaking children with dyslexia in grade 3. The sample consisted of 24 dyslexic children and 32 chronological age-matched typically developing readers. All participants completed two oral experimental tasks of inflectional morphological awareness (i.e., verb inflections and…

Purpose: The acquisition of literacy skills influences the perception and production of spoken language. We examined if orthography influences implicit processing in speech production in child readers and in adult readers with low and high reading proficiency. Method: Children (n = 17), adults with typical reading skills (n = 17), and adults…

Better understanding of the mechanisms underlying early reading skills can lead to improved interventions. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine multivariate associations among reading, language, spoken phonological awareness, and fingerspelling abilities for three groups of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) beginning readers: those who…

Developmental dyslexia is a language-based learning disability characterized by persistent difficulty in learning to read. While an understanding of genetic contributions is emerging, the ways the environment affects brain functioning in children with developmental dyslexia are poorly understood. A relationship between the home literacy…

This study investigated the comparative impact of two types of teaching techniques, namely concept mapping and paraphrasing, on the reading comprehension of EFL learners. For this purpose, 60 learners of a total number of 90 intermediate learners studying at a language school in Karaj, Iran, were chosen through taking a piloted PET for…

Although language experience is a key factor in successful foreign language (FL) learning, many FL learners fail to achieve performance levels that were predicted on the basis of their FL experience. This retrospective study investigated early cognitive and linguistic correlates of learning English as a foreign language (FL) in a group of…

This study tested the theory that future poor comprehenders would show modest but pervasive deficits in both language comprehension and production during early childhood as compared with future poor decoders and typical readers. Using an existing database (NICHD ECCRN), fifth-grade students were identified as having poor comprehension skills…

Compared with reading, writing and listening, there has been a paucity of empirical data documenting learners' experiences of speaking English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL) in different learning contexts in spite of the fact that developing the ability to speak in a second or foreign language is widely…

This study examined syntactic comprehension in French children with dyslexia in both listening and reading. In the first syntactic comprehension task, a partial version of the Epreuve de Comprehension syntaxico-semantique (ECOSSE test; French adaptation of Bishop's test for receptive grammar test) children with dyslexia performed at a lower level…

The lexical quality hypothesis assumes that skilled readers rely on high quality lexical representations that afford autonomous lexical retrieval and reduce the need to rely on top-down context. This experiment investigated this hypothesis by comparing the performance of adults classified on reading comprehension and spelling performance. "Lexical…