Cunningham and Stanovich reported a longitudinal investigation over 10 years that examined the unique influence of exposure to print in explaining individual differences on various measures of reading achievement and declarative (general) knowledge. The present study replicated their investigation with a larger number of participants and…

This study had three main aims. First, we examined to what extent listening comprehension, vocabulary, grammatical skills and verbal short-term memory (VSTM) assessed prior to formal reading instruction explained individual differences in early reading comprehension levels. Second, we examined to what extent the three common component skills,…

In two experiments, we examined the effects of text messaging during lecture on comprehension of lecture material. Students (in Experiment 1) and randomly assigned participants (in Experiment 2) in a text message condition texted a prescribed conversation while listening to a brief lecture. Students and participants in the no-text condition…

To what extent do toddlers have shared vocabularies? We examined CDI data collected from 14,607 infants and toddlers in five countries and measured the amount of variability between individual lexicons during development for both comprehension and production. Early lexicons are highly overlapping. However, beyond 100 words, toddlers share more…

This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject- and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12;11) with that…

This study investigated note-taking during multiple-text reading across two different task conditions in relation to comprehension performance and self-reports of strategy use. Forty-four undergraduates read multiple texts about climate change to write an argument or a summary. Analysis of students' spontaneous note-taking during reading…

Prior research has shown that readers are sensitive to causal relations between sentences. In addition, the extent to which readers put weight on causal relations seems to depend on their reading skill. Very little attention, however, has been given to the perception of causal relations linguistically expressed by different types of causal verbs…

Introduction: The purpose of this article is to explore the effect of nonverbal information (gestures and facial expressions) provided in real time on the interpretation of utterances by people with total blindness. Methods: The article reports on an exploratory study performed on two groups of participants with visual impairments who were tested…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the roles of emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill in children's expressive drawing. Fifty 7- to 10-year-olds were asked to produce two (happy and sad) expressive drawings, two representational drawings (drawing of a man running and drawing of a house) and to answer the…

This project examined academic reading in two contrasting English as a medium of instruction (EMI) university settings in Nepal and Sweden and the unique challenges facing students who are studying in a language other than their primary language. The motivation for the project was to explore the role of high-stakes testing in EMI contexts and the…

The article proposes a model for integrating TED Talks (TTs) in EFL college listening practice. It shows instructors where TTs can be located, gives reasons for using TTs, criteria for selecting TTs, the listening skills that can be developed, and an instructional strategy. TTs provide a variety of real-life themes, speakers, motivation, and…

Teachers everywhere are always faced with new challenges as they engage in their pedagogical praxis; it is not easy to cater for students' needs (whether special or not) and bring about new ideas to teach and arouse students' interest and desire to learn, especially when one's job does not end at the workplace and continues at home. These are but…

The purpose of this research is to develop a vocabulary assessment, Evaluation of Academic Vocabulary or "EAV," that gauges students' depth of knowledge of academic words and is sensitive to vocabulary growth in the context of literacy interventions. We report results from two studies with native English-speaking middle school students…

This article reports the results of a randomized control trial of a semester-long intervention designed to promote ninth-grade science students' use of text-based investigation to create explanatory models of biological phenomena. The main research question was whether the student participants in the intervention outperformed the students in the…

This study investigated an emergent interaction between word reading fluency and vocabulary knowledge in the prediction of reading comprehension among French immersion students in Grades 2 and 3. A group of 66 students were tested on measures of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, word reading accuracy, vocabulary, word reading…