Purpose: We used an eye-tracking technique to investigate whether English listeners use suprasegmental information about lexical stress to speed up the recognition of spoken words in English. Method: In a visual world paradigm, 24 young English listeners followed spoken instructions to choose 1 of 4 printed referents on a computer screen (e.g.,…

Phonemic awareness is thought to be a causal factor predicting early reading acquisition while its influence diminishes as other reading skills develop. This is a descriptive study of 74, primarily African American, fifth- through eighth-grade students attending a small, inner-city school. The study sought to determine the relationship between…

Foreign accents can vary considerably in the degree to which they deviate from the listener's native accent, but little is known about how the relationship between a speaker's accent and a listener's native language phonology mediates adaptation. Using an artificial accent methodology, we addressed this issue by constructing a set of three…

Background: A significant portion of adults struggle to read at a basic level. Word reading (defined here as decoding and word recognition) appears to play a pivotal role for this population of readers; however, less is known about how word reading relates to other important semantic processes (e.g., vocabulary, sentence processing) known to…

Background: Research has shown that paired associate learning (PAL) plays an important role in children's word reading across different languages. However, little is known about the construct of PAL and its relationship with word reading in Chinese children. Methods: A total of 204 second-year kindergarten children from Mainland China were…

The present study examines the impact of both short vowels and context on adult native English speakers' reading accuracy of Arabic orthography. To this end, two groups of adult Arabic learners with different proficiency levels were recruited: 30 second-year, and 30 third-year learners. Subjects were instructed to read 50 isolated words, 20…

Purpose: In individuals with cochlear implants, speech recognition is not associated with tests of working memory that primarily reflect storage, such as forward digit span. In contrast, our previous work found that vocoded speech recognition in individuals with normal hearing was correlated with performance on a forward digit span task. A…

Small-group interventions allow for tailored instruction for students with learning difficulties. A crucial first step is the accurate identification of students who need such an intervention. This study investigated how teachers decide whether their students need a remedial reading intervention. To this end, 64 teachers of 697 third-grade…

This study investigated the word reading and listening comprehension difficulties of fourth-grade students with significant reading comprehension deficits and the cognitive difficulties that underlie these weaknesses. Latent profile analysis was used to classify a sample of fourth-grade students (n = 446) who scored below the 16th percentile on a…

Family engagement in schooling has academic benefits for students and has been cited in decreasing the achievement gap. Half of all study district first-grade students did not meet benchmark goals on continuous text reading assessments. Further, first-grade treatment school students performed below published benchmarks on measures of sight word…

Purpose: Both fictional oral narrative and expository oral discourse skills are critical language competencies that support children's academic success. Few studies, however, have examined African American children's microstructure performance across these genres. To address this gap in the literature, the study compared African American…

This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of the Multi-Component Reading Intervention Program (MRIP) developed to support reading fluency skills and reading motivation of third and fourth grade Turkish students with learning difficulties (LD). The changing criterion design, a single-subject research method, was used in determining the…

This study examines the effects of monologic and dialogic task sequences on incidental vocabulary learning among 115 students in four intact classes of a Chinese vocational high school. Twenty vocabulary items including words, phrases and fixed expressions ranging from high to low frequency levels were targeted. Students were required to complete…

Purpose: Studies on reading in individuals with severe-to-profound hearing loss (deaf) raise the possibility that, due to deficient phonological coding, deaf individuals may rely more on orthographic-semantic links than on orthographic-phonological links. However, the relative contribution of phonological and semantic information to visual word…

The distinctive features of the Arabic language and orthography offer opportunities to investigate multiple word characteristics at the item level. The aim of this paper was to model differences in word reading at the item level among 3rd grade native Arabic-speaking children (n = 303) using cross-classified generalized random-effects (CCGRE)…