Preschool morphological awareness contributes to word reading at the very earliest stages of learning to read in a transparent orthography
AbstractThe purpose of the current study was to examine whether morphological awareness measured before children are taught to read (Kindergarten in Israel) predicts reading accuracy and fluency in the middle of first grade, at the very beginning of the process of learning to read pointed Hebrew – a highly transparent orthography, and whether this contribution remains after controlling for phonemic awareness. In a longitudinal design, 680 Hebrew-speaking children were administered morphological and phonemic awareness measures at the end of the preschool year (before they were taught to re ad) then followed up into first ...
Source: Reading and Writing - October 10, 2022 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Precursors of reading text comprehension from paper and screen in first graders: a longitudinal study
AbstractResearch on text comprehension in relation to the reading medium (paper or screen) has mainly involved undergraduate or high school students. To advance current knowledge on the effects of reading medium, this longitudinal study focused on beginner readers, specifically, the role of precursors in first graders ’ comprehension of narrative and expository linear texts from reading on paper and computer screen. Working memory and inference skills as cognitive precursors and basic digital skills were measured at the end of preschool (T1); reading text comprehension and word reading, as a control variable, w ere measu...
Source: Reading and Writing - October 8, 2022 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Spelling errors by Spanish children when writing in English as a foreign language
This study sheds light on the spelling development of foreign language learners, and illustrates the interference that the native language may have when the two orthographies of the speller are linguistically distant. Considering the findings, educational implications to improve foreign language spelling instruction at school are offered. (Source: Reading and Writing)
Source: Reading and Writing - October 5, 2022 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Modeling chinese high school EFL writers ’ language mindsets, goal orientations, and feedback-seeking behavior: the interaction effect between language mindsets and writing competence
This study was conducted at a prestigious public high school in southwest mainland China, with a sample of 462 12th grade students. Our path model provided the following three major findings. First , growth mindset students may pursue learning or performance-approach goals. Regardless of writing competence, they would both inquire and monitor teacher feedback. Second, learning oriented growth mindset students preferred feedback monitoring, whereas performance-approach oriented growth mindset s tudents preferred feedback inquiry. Third, only highly proficient fixed mindset students pursued performance-approach goals, which ...
Source: Reading and Writing - October 5, 2022 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Learning to read Chinese: the roles of phonological awareness, paired –associate learning, and phonetic radical awareness
This study aimed to determine how Chinese children adapt to Chinese orthography –phonology correspondence by acquiring phonetic radical awareness (PRA). This study used two important Chinese encoding approaches (rote and orthographic approaches) as the developmental trajectory, in which the present study hypothesized that phonological awareness (PA) exerts not only a direct i nfluence on PRA but also an indirect influence through paired– associate learning (PAL). We also explored whether the association between PA and PAL is affected by the complexity of visual stimuli embedded in PAL. This study recruited 70 s-grade ...
Source: Reading and Writing - October 5, 2022 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Effects of negative emotional valence on readers ’ text processing and memory for text: an eye-tracking study
AbstractComprehension of stories requires readers to take the perspective of the story characters and imagine or feel their cognitive and affective states. The study investigated how variations in emotional valence within a literary text affected readers ’ global text processing, as reflected in their eye movements during the first and second-pass reading, and their memory for text. Processes of reading were also examined in relation to readers’ dispositional empathy. Undergraduate students (N = 42) were assigned to an emotionally negative o r neutral reading condition. They read a natural text passage from a suspe...
Source: Reading and Writing - October 3, 2022 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Reading and math skills development among Finnish primary school children before and after COVID-19 school closure
This study quantified the possible learning losses in reading and math skills among a sample of Finnish Grade 3 children (n = 198) who spent 8 weeks in distance learning during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020. We compared their reading and math skill development trajectories across Grades 1, 2, and 4 to a pre-COVID sample (N = 378). We also examined if gender, parental education, maternal homework involvement, and child’s task-avoidant behavior predict children’s academic skills at Grade 4 differently in the pre-COVID sample compared with the COVID sample. Children’s reading and math s...
Source: Reading and Writing - September 27, 2022 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Phonological and orthographic processing in basic literacy adults and dyslexic children
AbstractThe aim of the present study was to examine the hypothesis that, compared to typically reading children matched on regular word reading, adults with basic literacy (either adult literacy students or adult basic education students) struggle on phonologically demanding tasks but are relatively performant on orthographic demanding tasks, and hence present a performance pattern similar to that of dyslexic children. Using various reading and phoneme awareness tests, we therefore compared the adults to both typically reading children from Grades 3 and 4 and dyslexic children, these two groups being matched to the adults ...
Source: Reading and Writing - September 15, 2022 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Component awareness facilitates Chinese character recognition in non-native Chinese speakers: analysis of the multiple mediation effect
This study investigated the development of component awareness, semantic radical identification ability, semantic radical knowledge application, Chinese character recognition, and the relationship among these abilities in nonnative speakers. A total of 139 Vietnamese undergraduates majoring in Chinese language who were sorted according to Chinese learning time (second-year, third-year, and fourth-year students) took part in the present study and completed a delayed copy task, a semantic cue searching task, a sentence cloze task, and a Chinese character recognition test. The results showed that (1) semantic radical identifi...
Source: Reading and Writing - September 6, 2022 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Distinctive patterns of language and executive functions contributing to reading development in chinese-speaking children with ADHD
This study evaluated the distinct contributions of language comprehension and EF components to reading comprehension in order to reveal the possible mechanisms underlying poor reading comprehension among children with ADHD. A total of 69 Chinese-speaking children aged 8 –12 years who were typically developing (TD, n = 36) or had ADHD (n = 33) participated in this study. All participants were assessed through intelligence, reading, and language comprehension tests. EF skills were measured using a verbal working memory (WM) test and four behavior tasks: the go/no-go task, a spatial WM (SWM) task, the Tower of Londo...
Source: Reading and Writing - September 4, 2022 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Does brief exposure to a written text affect spelling performance in a second language?
AbstractBecause both spelling and reading abilities tap orthographic knowledge, improvements in one ability may lead to improvements in the other. Here, we test whether spelling performance in a second-language (L2) can be improved by a short L2 reading task, as brief exposure to an L2 can increase the activation of L2 representations, making orthographic conventions more available. Participants were 89 adult native Hebrew speakers who were advanced learners of English as an L2. They performed a dictation task on 80 English words, before and after a brief exposure phase. In the Reading Aloud condition participants orally r...
Source: Reading and Writing - September 2, 2022 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Bidirectional longitudinal relationship between chinese children ’s compounding awareness and idiom comprehension among from grades 3 to 5
This study adopted a two-year three-wave cross-lag design to investigate the developmental relationship between children’s compounding awareness and idiom comprehension and its mechanism of action. A total of 132 Chinese children in grades 3 participated in a series of tests at three-time points. After controlling the homophone awareness, homograph awareness, phonological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, rapid automatic naming, and non-verbal IQ, the following results were obtained: (1) childre n’s compounding awareness in grade 4 had a significant predictive effect on the level of idiom comprehension in grade 5; (2) c...
Source: Reading and Writing - July 17, 2022 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Context facilitates the decoding of lexically ambiguous words for adult literacy learners
AbstractAn estimated one-fifth of adults in the United States possess low literacy skills, which includes minimal proficiency in reading and difficulty processing contextual information. One way to study reading behavior of adults with low literacy is through eye movement studies; however, these investigations have been generally limited. Thus, the present study collected eye movement data (e.g., gaze duration, total time, regressions) from adult literacy learners while they read sentences to investigate online reading behavior. We manipulated the lexical ambiguity of the target words, context strength, and context locatio...
Source: Reading and Writing - July 7, 2022 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Dynamic assessment as a predictor of reading development: a systematic review
AbstractAssessments of reading and reading-related skills which measure acquired knowledge may pose problems for the prediction of future reading performance. Such static measures often result in floor effects in the early stages of reading instruction, and may be particularly inaccurate predictors for children from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds. Dynamic assessment (DA), in contrast, focuses on learning potential by measuring response to teaching, and may therefore be a less biased form of assessment. We conducted a systematic review of the literature to assess the ability of dynamic measures of r...
Source: Reading and Writing - July 4, 2022 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
Oral reading prosody and the relation with reading abilities: A comparison of two rating scales
AbstractSeveral cross-linguistic studies found that oral reading prosody (i.e., prosodic variations in reading aloud) correlates with reading comprehension. As an extension, the present study aimed to examine the relationship between oral reading prosody and beyond word-level reading abilities in tone languages like Mandarin. One hundred and nine third-grade children were recruited in Taipei, Taiwan and undertook the following tasks: nonverbal IQ, vocabulary and syntactic knowledge, word reading, reading fluency (rate and accuracy), reading comprehension, and oral reading prosody. In the oral reading prosody task, children...
Source: Reading and Writing - July 2, 2022 Category: Child Development Source Type: research
