Students with or at risk of reading difficulties (RD) benefit from accurate early identification and intervention. Previous research has employed various decoding measures to screen students for RD, but the criteria for identification have been inconsistent. Assessing students with RD is especially challenging in English Language Learners (ELLs),…

Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) is a developmental speech sound disorder (SSD) notable for its severity and persistence of speech difficulties. A debate has surfaced historically about the cause of the speech and language deficits observed in the disorder. As children with CAS often present with comorbid language problems (i.e., receptive and…

Background: This study explored the impact of different cut-off points used to identify children with reading difficulties on the distribution of these children across the three poor reader groups predicted by the simple view of reading (dyslexia, specific comprehension difficulty and mixed difficulty). Additionally, the study investigated whether…

Traditional static tests of reading and reading-related skills offer some ability to predict future reading performance, though such screeners may misclassify children with or at risk of reading disorder (RD). Dynamic assessment (DA) is an alternative approach that measures learning potential and may be less dependent on learning background. A…

Definitions of dyslexia typically make reference to unexpected poor reading, although how best to operationalize unexpected remains an issue. When operationally defined as reading below expectations based on the level of oral language, cases of unexpected poor reading make up fewer than half of cases of poor reading, and cases of unexpected poor…

Purpose: Bayesian-based models for diagnosis are common in medicine but have not been incorporated into identification models for dyslexia. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate Bayesian identification models that included a broader set of predictors and that capitalized on recent developments in modeling the prevalence of dyslexia.…

This exploratory study aimed at developing a dyslexia assessment tool in the Amharic language and to collect initial reliability and validity data on the tool designed to identify dyslexia in Grade 3. The developed battery consists of 10 tests. Data were collected from 121 Amharic-speaking children, aged 9-12 years. Evidence of construct validity…

This study investigated how well second language (L2) readers of English use context to identify proper names as such. It represents a first step in exploring a widely held assumption that L2 readers of English can easily identify proper names by their form and function. The study isolates the issue of function to investigate whether context alone…

We examined the unique contributions of prosodic awareness and morphological awareness to school-aged children's word reading and reading comprehension. A total of 110 elementary-age children from Grades 4 and 5 participated in the current study. To measure prosodic awareness, children were asked to listen to and reflect on the stress patterns of…

Prior research on reading difficulties has mainly focused on word decoding problems. However, there exists another group of children -- poor comprehenders (PCs) -- who have normal word decoding abilities but difficulties in reading comprehension. Less is known about PCs especially in non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese. This study identified…

Proficiency, accuracy and fluency in reading is an essential part of nurturing a disposition towards learning, growth and continued education for any student who wishes to be successful in school. Many studies have assessed the efficiency and success of various reading programs that have been developed to improve these areas of reading…

Structured Literacy (SL) approaches are often recommended for students with dyslexia and other poor decoders (e.g., International Dyslexia Association, 2017). Examples of SL approaches include the Wilson Reading System (Wilson, 1988), Orton-Gillingham (Gillingham & Stillman, 2014), the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program (Lindamood &…

Reading impairment is more common in males, but the magnitude and origin of this gender difference are debated. In a large-scale study of reading impairment among 491,103 beginning second-graders, gender differences increased with greater severity of reading impairment, peaking at a ratio of 2.4:1 for a broad measure of fluency and a ratio of…

The study investigated the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and novel word reading. Fourth-grade students were assessed on standardized measures of word identification, decoding, and receptive vocabulary, as well as on an experimental word identification measure using words that students in the fourth grade are unlikely to have seen…

While prior knowledge of a passage topic is known to facilitate comprehension, little is known about how it affects word identification. We examined oral reading errors in good and poor readers when reading a passage where they either had prior knowledge of the passage topic or did not. Children who had prior knowledge of the topic were matched on…