Fluent reading is characterized by speed and accuracy in the decoding and comprehension of connected text. Although a variety of measures are available for the assessment of reading skills most tests do not evaluate rate of text recognition as reflected in fluent reading. Here we evaluate FastaReada, a customized computer-generated task that was developed to address some of the limitations of c...

Word and pseudoword reading are related abilities that are fundamental to reading development in alphabetic orthographies. They are respectively assumed to index children’s orthographic representations of words as acquired through the underlying ‘self-teaching mechanism’ of alphabetic pseudoword decoding. However, little is known about the concurrent growth trajectories of these skills in the e...

The development of reading ability in a group of deaf children was followed over a three year period. 29 deaf children, aged 7-8 years old at the first assessment, participated in the study and every 12 months they were given a battery of literacy, cognitive and language based tasks. Earlier vocabulary and speechreading skills predicted longitudinal growth in reading achievement. The relations ...

Against a backdrop of research on individual differences in reading disorders, this review considers a range of effective interventions to promote reading and language skills evaluated by our group. The review begins by contrasting the reading profiles seen in dyslexia and reading comprehension impairment and then argues that different interventions will be required. It is well established that...

According to gender stereotypes, reading is for girls. In this study, we investigated the role of preschool teachers in transmitting such gendered expectations. We suggest that boys are less motivated to read in preschool, and less competent in reading 1 year later in primary school, if their preschool teacher holds a traditional gender role attitude than if the teacher has egalitarian beliefs....

Fine motor skills have long been recognized as an important foundation for development in other domains. However, more precise insights into the role of fine motor skills, and their relationships to other skills in mediating early educational achievements, are needed to support the development of optimal educational interventions. We explored concurrent relationships between two components of f...

Student Confidence in Reading in Rural China Qiufeng Gao, Hongmei Yi, Huan Wang, Yaojiang Shi, Cody Abbey, and Scott Rozelle Abstract This paper aims to investigate student confidence in reading in a developing and middle-income country by collecting and reporting on survey data from 135 primary schools in rural China. In the survey, we adopted and conducted the Progress in International Readin...

The relationship between sensory sensitivity and reading performance was examined to test the hypothesis that the orthographic and phonological skills engaged in visual word recognition are constrained by the ability to detect dynamic visual and auditory events. A test battery using sensory psychophysics, psychometric tests, and measures of component literacy skills was administered to 32 unsel...

Previous research suggests that children with developmental dyslexia have low-level visual and auditory deficits. The present study further examines these proposed deficits and how they relate to component reading skills. Children with dyslexia and control children were administered measures of visual and auditory processing and a battery of reading tasks, including nonword and irregular-word r...