Curriculum-based measurement is designed to predict students' future reading performance and identify children in need of early reading intervention. Although curriculum-based measures in reading are commonly implemented in schools throughout the United States, their use with children living overseas is restricted due to the disparity that exists…

The prevalence rate of learners with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has risen concurrently with their inclusion into public schools in Saudi Arabia. Being in schools, they face academic challenges, particularly in reading. This increased rate evokes the importance of implementing valuable strategies to keep up the academic skills of those…

With the increasing prevalence of autism diagnoses globally, the overall aim of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of the linguistic aptitude of autistic individuals. Given that the autism diagnosis is a spectrum, we rely on the Autism Quotient (AQ) test, which measures the quantity of autistic-like traits an individual possesses,…

Nawat, the highly endangered indigenous language of El Salvador, is undergoing a revitalization process. This dissertation, conceived within this context, focuses on the second-language (L2) acquisition of features of Nawat pronunciation by learners who have Salvadoran Spanish as their first language (L1). Specifically, I assess the acquisition of…

Traditionally, Basque has three voiceless affricates that are different in their place of articulation. More precisely, affricates can have a lamino-alveolar, apico-alveolar, and prepalatal place of articulation and the graphemes used to represent them are respectively. Likewise, Basque has been described as having three fricatives with the same…

Learning to read can pose a major challenge to students, and much of this challenge is due to the fact that written language is necessarily impoverished when compared to the rich, continuous speech signal. Prosodic elements of language are scarcely represented in written text, and while oral reading prosody has been addressed in the literature…

This study investigated the effects of shared reading on oral vocabulary development with 42 second language (L2) learners in Dakar, Senegal. Participants, ranging from four to six years old, were taught French target words using predictable books, non-predicable books, and control activities of the typical local instructional practice of using…

The Problem. In its meta-analysis on teaching children to read, U.S. National Reading Panel (NICHD & NIH, 2000) found repeated reading to be an effective technique for reading instruction. Specifically, the report determined that repeated reading procedures had a positive impact on word recognition, fluency, and comprehension across a range of…