While it is well-established that listeners judge accents different from their own, and that this listener bias has pervasive consequences to the speakers, we have only offered a cursory attention to understand the nature of this accent bias. This paper explores listeners' judgments, ratings, and qualitative comments associated with psychosocial,…

Ongoing research-practice conversations between teachers and researchers have identified a practical tension faced by teachers of upper primary/early secondary students whose progress has slowed. Teachers report that a researcher-led push to develop more sophisticated readings of complex texts results in less reading mileage, potentially impacting…

Previous research has highlighted the difficulty that infants have in learning to use color words. Even after acquiring the words themselves, infants are reported to use them incorrectly, or overextend their usage. We tested 146 infants from 5 different age groups on their knowledge of 6 basic color words, "red", "green",…

This study is designed to explore the role of second language (L2) English learners' working memory (WM), language proficiency, and age in the processing and comprehension of English anaphoric sentences. To this end, 40 EFL learners participated in the study. The proficiency levels of the participants varied from elementary to high-intermediate,…

Touch cues might facilitate infants' early word comprehension and explain the early understanding of body part words. Parents were instructed to teach their infants, 4- to 5-month-olds or 10- to 11-month-olds, nonce words for body parts and a contrast object. Importantly, they were given no instructions about the use of touch. Parents…

This study examined relations between children's false statements and response latency, executive functioning, and truth--lie understanding in order to understand what underlies children's emerging ability to make false statements. A total of 158 (2- to 5-year-old) children earned prizes for claiming that they were looking at birds even when…

While composition research recognizes the importance of the body and bodily knowledge, literacy instruction, especially as relayed in writing textbooks, often disembodies the material practice of reading. This move, in turn, contributes to normative assumptions about students' corporeal reading experiences. Drawing together scholarship on…

Teachers of elementary English language arts/literacy (ELA) tend to line up behind one of two very different approaches to reading instruction. The first approach prioritizes reading comprehension strategies over content. The second rests on the idea that building background knowledge of the world, including the vocabulary that accompanies such…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the contribution of decoding and reading fluency to reading comprehension and how it differs across different types of comprehension measures among 4th-grade students with reading difficulties and disabilities (M age = 9.8, SD = 0.6). Results indicated that decoding and reading fluency predicted 8.1% to…

International education policy makers, donors, and implementers have heavily emphasized correct words per minute (CWPM) to measure reading intervention impact. While fluency integrates accuracy, automaticity, and prosody, the dominant measurement approach measures rate and accuracy within 1 minute, thereby privileging the need for speed. Many…

The present research extends recent work on the prediction of preschool language skills by exploring prediction from decontextualized vocabulary comprehension. Vocabulary comprehension was a stronger predictor than parent-reported production, yielding a quadrupling of variance accounted for relative to prior studies. Parallel studies (Studies 1…

Children and adults use established global knowledge to generate real-time linguistic predictions, but less is known about how listeners generate predictions in circumstances that semantically conflict with long-standing event knowledge. We explore these issues in adults and 5- to 10-year-old children using an eye-tracked sentence comprehension…

Due to the increasing educational use of the Internet, children in elementary school need to critically evaluate source information to judge the trustworthiness of information. Studies with adult readers show that sourcing prompts and mutually exclusive claims in reading materials promote the use of source information. However, little is known…

Aim: This position paper illustrates prominent theories of reading comprehension and considers how these models have informed reading instruction within the classroom. It then considers how reading comprehension can be supported by educational psychologists (EPs). Methods: This paper presents five sociocultural models of reading comprehension.…

With increased availability of information in modern societies, individuals are often faced with complex decisions regarding how to integrate and judge the veracity of available information. Generally, these issues have been approached using computational techniques to "detect" and "reduce" the spread of information across…