The purpose of this case series was to explore whether adults who did not have the opportunity to acquire reading skills during childhood are able to do so rapidly if trained with an adequate literacy program. After 14 weeks of training with a new, optimized, literacy course based on cognitive research, six out of eight participants became able to…

We investigated the contribution of morphological awareness to university students' reading comprehension ability. Although there is considerable evidence that morphological awareness contributes to children's reading ability, there is much less evidence concerning adults; the few studies of adults have not controlled other known predictors of…

Are difficulties of individuals with dyslexia (IDDs) reduced or enhanced in tasks where linguistic regularities typically facilitate performance, such as vocabulary acquisition and reading? If impaired short-term memory and poor phonological decoding pose the main impediments to IDDs, then they are expected to compensate for these difficulties…

In this chapter, we examine adult- and child-focused models of reading with respect to cognitive processing deficits associated with low literacy. We examine influential integrative models of reading and reading comprehension. We then review the empirical literature on components of reading ability, subdivided into three categories: language…

The aim of this study was to examine predictions derived from a proposal about the relation between word-decoding skill and working memory capacity, called verbal efficiency theory. The theory states that poor word representations and slow decoding processes consume resources in working memory that would otherwise be used to execute high-level…

The current study employed a meta-analytic approach to investigate the relative importance of component reading skills to reading comprehension in struggling adult readers. A total of 10 component skills were consistently identified across 16 independent studies and 2,707 participants. Random effects models generated 76 predictor-reading…

The following insights into the reading skills of 312 participants in adult basic and secondary education programs are based on a principal components analysis of reading components' contributions to variance in reading comprehension. Overall, 75% of variance was explained by four composite variables representing word skills, language…

The ability to learn visual-phonological associations is a unique predictor of word reading, and individuals with developmental dyslexia show impaired ability in learning these associations. In this study, we compared developmentally dyslexic and nondyslexic adults on their ability to form cross-modal associations (or "bindings") based…

A theoretical situation-person-interactions model of learning and performance is presented, and applications of the model through the Instrumental Language Functions (ILF) approach with preschool normal and older variously handicapped children and adults are described. The model is graphically depicted and discussed according to such aspects as…

Writing samples were examined from 42 post-secondary students with or without writing difficulties. Guided by the Simple View of Writing (Berninger et al., 2002), the samples were examined for evidence of difficulties with lower-order transcription processes and higher-order composition skills. Retrospective reports on writing strategies were also…

A study examined adult low-literate readers' knowledge of their cognitive skills. By better knowing this clientele from both the cognitive and metacognitive angles, several objectives could be met, including remedying a lack of knowledge in their assessment, and building a valid curriculum content closer to their needs. Many studies suggest that a…