The present study examined whether syntactic comprehension constitutes a source of individual differences separate from vocabulary and of relevance to reading comprehension. One hundred and sixty-one Danish Grade 6 students completed multiple tests of syntactic comprehension, vocabulary, decoding, and reading comprehension. Syntax measures were…

The importance of oral language skills in reading comprehension is widely recognized in contemporary models. Building on this foundation, we propose the Linguistic Pathways Model. In this model, we illuminate mechanistic and developmental detail by which individual components of oral language support reading comprehension and embrace the multiple…

Purpose: Despite the considerable scientific interest in researching the reading skills of the deaf population, most of these studies focus on reading comprehension (RC) at the word or sentence level. Such reading activates different underlying language processes than text-level reading, which is more akin to real-life reading literacy. The…

Educators and researchers have been interested in supporting sentence-level language comprehension for struggling readers, but it has been challenging to research. To investigate the properties of sentences that might be useful targets for future research in instruction and assessment, we coded several features of the items in a computer-adaptive…

Background: Studies of syntactic comprehension and reading comprehension use a wide range of syntactic comprehension tests that vary considerably in format. The goal of this study was to examine to which extent different formats of syntactic comprehension tests measure the same construct. Methods: Sixty-nine Grade 4 students completed multiple…

The current study combined sentence plausibility judgment and self-paced reading tasks to examine the comprehension strategies and processing patterns of Chinese deaf individuals when comprehending written Chinese sentences with syntactic-semantic cue conflicts. Similar to findings from previous crosslinguistic studies on deaf readers, the Chinese…

This study investigates whether syntactic unification occurs during online L2 sentence comprehension using time-frequency analysis. We measured the oscillatory power changes in native English speakers and L1-Cantonese L2-English speakers while they were reading well-formed English sentences, syntactically intact nonsense sentences, and random word…

This study investigates whether the use of prosodic cues during instruction facilitates the processing of German accusative case markers. Two groups of third semester L1 English learners of L2 German completed Processing Instruction (PI) with aural input: Learners in the PI+P group heard sentences that included focused prosodic cues; learners in…

Recent studies have shown that fluent reading of word lists requires additional skills beyond efficient recognition of individual words. This study examined the specific contribution of between-word processing (sequential processing efficiency, indexed by serial digit RAN) and subskills related to text-level processing (vocabulary and syntactic…

Sentence comprehension requires both syntactic prediction and working memory processes. Evidence suggests that both are impaired in agrammatic aphasia, and can independently contribute to comprehension breakdowns, but the relationship between them, especially during real-time sentence comprehension remains unclear. Two EEG studies investigated…

The current study is an exploration of the association between the characteristics of students' written compositions and their reading comprehension performance. We address the empirical question about the degree to which writing is predictive of reading comprehension by comparing the utility of several popular written composition metrics. These…

Background: Research has demonstrated that distinct oral language skills contribute unique variance to text comprehension in students from second grade onward. This study examined these relationships for kindergarten students whose comprehension is often assumed to be determined by word decoding skills. Method: Eighty-eight kindergarten students…

Theories of reading comprehension have widely predicted a role for syntactic skills, or the ability to understand and manipulate the structure of a sentence. Yet, these theories are based primarily on English, leaving open the question of whether this remains true across typologically different languages such as English versus Chinese. There are…

The simple view of reading (SVR) framework has been used for decades to explain two general component skills considered to contribute to reading comprehension: decoding and linguistic comprehension. In the past, researchers have assessed the linguistic comprehension component using a wide range of language and/or listening comprehension measures…

Background: Executive function (EF) is significantly associated with reading comprehension outcomes, yet the interaction between EF and critical language skills (including vocabulary, morphological awareness (MA) and syntactic knowledge), across these levels of reading comprehension (literal, inferential and evaluative comprehension) has rarely…