An individual diagnosed with dyslexia in childhood typically remains dyslexic throughout his/her life. However, the cognitive profile of adults with dyslexia has been less explored than that of children. This meta-analytic study is intended to clarify three questions: (1) To what extent, and in what manner, do adults with reading difficulties…

This essay is about the improbable emergence of written language six millennia ago that gave rise to the even more improbable, highly sophisticated reading brain of the twenty-first century. How it emerged and what it comprises--both in its most basic iteration in the very young reader and in its most elaborated iteration in the expert reader--is…

School psychologists are often involved in evaluating students who have been referred for reading problems or are suspected of having dyslexia. To accomplish this task, it is important to have a thorough understanding of dyslexia, and know what factors to consider. Therefore, the purposes of this article are to describe: (1) the primary and…

We examined the impact of the effects of dyslexia on various processing and cognitive components (e.g., reading speed and accuracy) in a language with high phonological and orthographic consistency. Greek dyslexic children were compared with a chronological age-matched group on tasks that tested participants' phonological and orthographic…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate rapid automatized naming skills (RAN) and immediate memory processes in 243 Chinese Mandarin-speaking elementary readers (ranging from Grade 1 to Grade 5). For RAN subtests, the mean naming time decreased monotonically with grade level in good and average readers, and a similar trajectory was found in poor…

This study, involving 47 students in grades 2-10, investigated letter-naming speed to determine whether it measures cognitive speed, a theoretical factor that purportedly influences reading rate. It was determined that cognitive speed and cognitive power are two independent factors and that letter-naming speed can be used to measure cognitive…

Thus far the several different strategies that have been employed to investigate the size of the perceptual span during reading have not yet resolved the question of whether good readers have a larger span than poor readers. An investigation was designed to determine the region of text from which letter information is used during a fixation of the…

A sample of 48 second grade and fifth grade children, containing equal numbers of high and low ability readers, participated in a study that explored the degree to which oral and silent reading represented the same cognitive process for different age and ability level children. Their reading rates and comprehension scores for both oral and silent…

Reading comprehension is a very complex task that requires different cognitive processes and reading abilities over the life span. There are fewer studies of reading comprehension relative to investigations of word reading abilities. Reading comprehension difficulties, however, have been identified in two common and frequently overlapping…

Research on children's oral reading errors provides evidence that both top down and bottom up processes interactively contribute to reading. Syntactic and semantic expectations are sources of information for top down processing, while knowledge of letter-sound relations provides information for bottom up processing. As children learn to read,…

This study investigated the ability of temporal processing measures obtained before school entry to predict early reading development in an unselected sample of 125 children (68 males, 57 females). Visual and auditory temporal order judgment (TOJ) tasks measured at Preschool (mean age 5.36 years) significantly predicted letter and word…