Application of psycholinguistic insights initiated a long career researching how children learn to read words. A theory was proposed claiming that spellings individual words are stored in memory when their graphemes become bonded phonemes pronunciations along with meanings, and this enables readers automatically “by sight”. Our studies offered support for theory. In addition, they clarified mov...

Dynamic assessment (DA) of word reading measures learning potential for early reading development by documenting the amount of assistance needed to learn how to read words with unfamiliar orthography. We examined the additive value of DA for predicting first-grade decoding and word recognition development while controlling for autoregressive effects. Additionally, we examined whether predictive...

A few years ago a reading method called “word-focused extensive reading” was proposed for adults learning the fine details of word usage (Cheng 1998a, 1998b, 1998c). In this mode of reading the computer retrieved from a large corpus and displayed the word in question in a sentence. In reading similar sentences the reader would hopefully gain the knowledge of the word usage. That is the idea of ...

Current theories of reading eye movements claim that reading saccades are programmed primarily on the basis of information about the length of the upcoming word, determined by low-level visual processes that detect spaces to the right of fixation. Many studies attempted to test this claim by filling spaces between words with various non-space symbols (fillers). This manipulation, however, confo...

Relations between reading and writing have been studied extensively but the less is known about the developmental nature of their interrelations. This study applied latent change score modeling to investigate longitudinal relations between reading and writing skills at the word, sentence and text levels. Latent change score models were used to compare unidirectional pathways (reading-to-writing...

The Simple View of Reading (SVR) in Chinese was examined in a genetically sensitive design. A total of 270 pairs of Chinese twins (190 pairs of monozygotic twins and 80 pairs of same-sex dizygotic twins) were tested on Chinese vocabulary and word reading at the mean age 7.8 years and reading comprehension of sentences and passages one year later. Results of behavior-genetic analyses showed that...