Structural priming is the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across sentences and can be divided into short-term (prime to immediately following target) and long-term (across an experimental session) components. This study investigates how nondeclarative memory could support both the transient, short-term and the persistent, long-term…

This study aimed to profile the sublexical, lexical, and text level language skills, and cognitive processes of a sub-group of children with poor reading comprehension known as poor comprehenders. An assessment protocol was developed to assess each of the components from Perfetti and Stafura's Reading Systems Framework. A comprehensive profile was…

Although metaphors are essential tools in everyday communication and educational settings, the literature lacks evidence of effective training tools to promote metaphor comprehension in typical development. Grounding in theoretical pragmatics, we developed a novel metaphor comprehension training (MetaCom) for school-age children that focuses on…

In the present study, 144 second- and 150 fourth-grade Chinese students were recruited to complete a Chinese character learning task to explore the specific contributions of sensory-motor components (i.e., visual, motor, and haptic systems) of handwriting to Chinese character learning. After matching for age, nonverbal IQ, and a series of…

Literacy levels in Africa are low, and school instruction outcomes are not promising. Africa also has a disproportionate number of unschooled children. Phonological awareness (PA), especially phoneme awareness, is critically associated with literacy, but there is little evidence about whether PA is gained through literacy, schooling, or both,…

Thirty grade 4 subjects were individually tested on a digit span test of working memory capacity (Case and Kurland) and the Reading Span Test (Daneman and Carpenter). The Reading Span Test was administered using sentences at a grade 2, grade 4, and grade 6 reading level. It was predicted that, as the decoding demands of the stimulus sentences in…