Although eye movements have been used widely to investigate how skilled adult readers process written language, relatively little research has used this methodology with children. This is unfortunate as, as we discuss here, eye-movement studies have significant potential to inform our understanding of children's reading development. We consider…

Background: Strong associations between infant vocabulary and school-age language and literacy skills would have important practical and theoretical implications: Preschool assessment of vocabulary skills could be used to identify children at risk of reading and language difficulties, and vocabulary could be viewed as a cognitive foundation for…

Background: Poor comprehenders have difficulty comprehending connected text, despite having age-appropriate levels of reading accuracy and fluency. We used a longitudinal design to examine earlier reading and language skills in children identified as poor comprehenders in mid-childhood. Method: Two hundred and forty-two children began the study at…

Although it is well recognized that reading skills vary in people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), reasons for this variability are not well understood. We used the simple view of reading model to investigate both word decoding and text comprehension processes in two well-established subtypes within the autism spectrum, those with…

This study compared orthographic and semantic aspects of word learning in children who differed in reading comprehension skill. Poor comprehenders and controls matched for age (9-10 years), nonverbal ability and decoding skill were trained to pronounce 20 visually presented nonwords, 10 in a consistent way and 10 in an inconsistent way. They then…

This study investigated reading skills in 41 children with autism spectrum disorder. Four components of reading skill were assessed: word recognition, nonword decoding, text reading accuracy and text comprehension. Overall, levels of word and nonword reading and text reading accuracy fell within average range although reading comprehension was…

Three experiments assessed memory skills in good and poor comprehenders, matched for decoding skill. Found that poor comprehenders showed normal sensitivity to phonological manipulations but that their recall of abstract words was poor. Poor comprehenders achieved normal spatial-memory span, but had impaired verbal-memory spans. (Author/KB)

This paper reviews recent experimental findings that inform our understanding of the development of reading comprehension. Studies investigating children who have specific difficulties with reading comprehension provide considerable information concerning the process involved in successful reading comprehension. This literature highlights aspects…

Assessed semantic priming for category coordinates and function-related words in children with good or poor reading comprehension, matched for decoding skill. Found that both groups showed priming for function-related words, but poor comprehenders showed priming for category coordinates only if the pairs shared high-association strength. Good…

Three experiments investigated the ability of eight-year old children with poor language comprehension to produce past tense forms of verbs. Twenty children selected as poor comprehenders were compared to 20 age-matched control children. Although the poor comprehenders performed less well than controls on a range of tasks considered to tap…

Two studies examined individual differences in 7- to 10-year-olds' contextual facilitation. Findings indicated that poor readers showed more contextual facilitation than good readers but the relative context benefit was greater for good readers. Comprehension was a better predictor of contextual facilitation that decoding. Dyslexics showed greater…