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Background: Delays in expressive vocabulary have been associated with lower outcomes in reading.Aim: The aim is to conduct a long-term follow-up study to investigate if early expressive vocabulary delay (late talking) predicts reading development in participants age 16 and under. We examine further if the prediction is different in the presence of family risk for dyslexia (FR) and early receptive vocabulary delay.Methods: Expressive and receptive vocabulary skills were assessed at the age of 2-2.5 years, and reading skills in Grades 2, 3, 8 and 9 (age 8-16). The longitudinal sample consisted of 200 Finnish-speaking children, of which 108 had FR for dyslexia and 92 came from families without reading difficulties. We compared the reading development of five subgroups: 1) FR and no vocabulary delay; 2) FR and late talkers, 3) FR, late talkers and co-existing receptive vocabulary delay; 4) no FR and late talkers; and 5) no FR and no vocabulary delay.Results: The group with FR and expressive and receptive vocabulary delay had difficulties in reading comprehension, but not in reading fluency. The late talkers without receptive vocabulary difficulties tended to become typical readers.Conclusions and Implications: Delays in early vocabulary can lead to a reading comprehension deficit, with the specification that expressive vocabulary deficit alone can alleviate in time, whereas the combined deficit is a stronger risk marker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to investigate how age at cochlear implantation (CI) and age at exposure to Cued Speech (CS, Manual system that resolves the ambiguity inherent lipreading) could impact literacy skills in deaf children. Ninety deaf children fitted with CI (early vs late) and exposed to CS (early vs late) from primary schools (from Grade 2 to Grade 5) took part in this study. Five literacy skills were assessed: phonological skills through phoneme deletion, reading (decoding and sentence comprehension), word spelling and vocabulary. The results showed that both age at CI and age at first exposure to CS had some influence on literacy skills but there was no interaction between these factors. This implies that the positive effects of age at CI, especially on all literacy skills in the younger children, were not strengthened by age at exposure to CS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides insight into the reading comprehension of hierarchically structured hypertexts within D/HH students and students with SLI. To our knowledge, it is the first study on hypertext comprehension in D/HH students and students with SLI, and it also considers the role of working memory. We compared hypertext versus linear text comprehension in D/HH students and students with SLI versus younger students without language problems who had a similar level of decoding and vocabulary. The results demonstrated no difference in text comprehension between the hierarchically structured hypertext and the linear text. Text comprehension of D/HH students and students with SLI was comparable to that of the students without language problems. In addition, there was a similar positive predictive value of visuospatial and not verbal working memory on hypertext comprehension for all three groups. The findings implicate that educational settings can make use of hierarchically structured hypertexts as well as linear texts and that children can navigate in the digital world from young age on, even if language or working memory problems are present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Knowledge about predictors for reading comprehension in children with intellectual disabilities (ID) is still fragmented.Aims: This study compared reading comprehension, word decoding, listening comprehension, and reading related linguistic and cognitive precursor measures in children with mild ID and typically developing controls. Moreover, it was explored how the precursors related to reading achievement.Method and Procedures: Children with mild ID and typical controls were assessed on reading comprehension, decoding, language comprehension, and linguistic (early literacy skills, vocabulary, grammar) and cognitive (rapid naming, phonological short-term memory, working memory, temporal processing, nonverbal reasoning) precursor measures. It was tested to what extent variations in reading comprehension could be explained from word decoding, listening comprehension and precursor measures.Outcomes and Results: The ID group scored significantly below typical controls on all measures. Word decoding was at or above first grade level in half the ID group. Reading comprehension in the ID group was related to word decoding, listening comprehension, early literacy skills, and temporal processing.Conclusion and Implications: The reading comprehension profile of children with mild ID strongly resembles typical early readers. The simple view of reading pertains to children with mild ID, with additional influence of early literacy skills and temporal processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies have demonstrated that children with poor reading comprehension abilities have weak expressive writing skills too. The aim of the present research was to establish whether poor comprehenders' low performance in expressive writing is mediated by the need to produce relevant inferences to construct the narrative. To do so, we compared two conditions: in one, the children's comprehension of the story relied partly on their ability to draw crucial causal inferences; in the other, all the information needed to follow the sequence of events was provided in pictures. Irrespective of the condition, poor comprehenders (aged 8-10 years) produced less effective written texts. Analyzing the use of connectives shed some light on the characteristics of the poor comprehenders' written narratives, which seemed to be less cohesive. The poor comprehenders tended to use more additive connectives than causal connectives, which is why their texts resembled a list of events with a description of each picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was two-fold: (a) to examine what component of executive functions (EF) - planning and working memory - predicts reading comprehension in young adults (Study 1), and (b) to examine if less skilled comprehenders experience deficits in the EF components (Study 2). In Study 1, we assessed 178 university students (120 females; mean age=21.82 years) on planning (Planned Connections, Planned Codes, and Planned Patterns), working memory (Listening Span, Digit Span Backward, and Digit Memory), and reading comprehension (Nelson-Denny Reading Test). The results of structural equation modeling indicated that only planning was a significant predictor of reading comprehension. In Study 2, we assessed 30 university students with a specific reading comprehension deficit (19 females; mean age=23.01 years) and 30 controls (18 females; mean age=22.77 years) on planning (Planned Connections and Crack the Code) and working memory (Listening Span and Digit Span Backward). The results showed that less skilled comprehenders performed significantly poorer than controls only in planning. Taken together, the findings of both studies suggest that planning is the preeminent component of EF that is driving its relationship with reading comprehension in young adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deaf students have traditionally exhibited reading comprehension difficulties. In recent years, these comprehension problems have been partially offset through cochlear implantation (CI), and the subsequent improvement in spoken language skills. However, the use of cochlear implants has not managed to fully bridge the gap in language and reading between normally hearing (NH) and deaf children, as its efficacy depends on variables such as the age at implant. This study compared the reading comprehension of sentences in 19 children who received a cochlear implant before 24 months of age (early-CI) and 19 who received it after 24 months (late-CI) with a control group of 19 NH children. The task involved completing sentences in which the last word had been omitted. To complete each sentence children had to choose a word from among several alternatives that included one syntactic and two semantic foils in addition to the target word. The results showed that deaf children with late-CI performed this task significantly worse than NH children, while those with early-CI exhibited no significant differences with NH children, except under more demanding processing conditions (long sentences with infrequent target words). Further, the error analysis revealed a preference of deaf students with early-CI for selecting the syntactic foil over a semantic one, which suggests that they draw upon syntactic cues during sentence processing in the same way as NH children do. In contrast, deaf children with late-CI do not appear to use a syntactic strategy, but neither a semantic strategy based on the use of key words, as the literature suggests. Rather, the numerous errors of both kinds that the late-CI group made seem to indicate an inconsistent and erratic response when faced with a lack of comprehension. These findings are discussed in relation to differences in receptive vocabulary and short-term memory and their implications for sentence reading comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Reading activity involves visual processing in nature. Compared with hearing people, visual processing may be more critical for deaf people. However, much less research has explored the impact of visual processing on the reading ability of deaf children, and the mechanism underlying this relationship is unclear.Aims: This study aimed to examine whether and how visual processing skills predict reading ability in elementary school deaf children in China.Methods and Procedures: A total of 118 Chinese deaf children (mean age = 14.60 years) from grades 4-6 were tested on the tasks of visual-graphic processing, visual-orthographic processing, word segmentation, reading comprehension, and reading fluency.Outcomes and Results: The results showed that after chronological age was controlled, visual-graphic processing and visual-orthographic processing significantly predicted Chinese deaf children's reading ability. Specifically, visual-orthographic processing played a mediating role in the effect of visual-graphic processing on reading ability, whereas word segmentation played a mediating role in the effect of visual-orthographic processing on reading ability. However, the mediating role of word segmentation, as well as the chain mediating effect of visual-orthographic processing and word segmentation in the influence of visual-graphic processing on reading ability, were not significant.Conclusions and Implications: These findings emphasized the importance of visual processing skills in reading activity and offered potential mechanisms underlying the contribution of visual processing skills to reading ability in Chinese deaf children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Students with dyslexia may be at a disadvantage on timed assessments that require reading skills compared to their non-dyslexic peers, even though they are not necessarily less intelligent or less prepared than these students.Aims: The study aims to analyze the possible benefits in reading comprehension and reading fluency of students with Dyslexia when using an assistance tool in an evaluation that requires reading skills.Methods and Procedures: Each participant with dyslexia did a reading comprehension assessment in two different reading interfaces: on a white paper and in our previously developed tool, in order to assess and compare their reading comprehension and reading fluency.Outcomes and Results: The results obtained show that students with dyslexia could benefit from the point of view of fluency and reading comprehension by using compensation software that helps them read in situations of anxiety.Conclusions and Implications: Properly designed assistive tools can enhance the reading skills of young people with dyslexia. The developed tool should be improved considering the improvements proposed in the present studies, in the same way it is suggested to carry out a study with a larger number of participants and evaluate them individually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a scarcity of research examining the reading comprehension skills of partially-sighted children despite evidence indicating that they lag behind their typically-sighted (TS) peers in reading comprehension ability. We compare the performance of children with visual impairments (VIs) with that of chronological-age matched TS counterparts on a task that requires them to make emotional, temporal and spatial inferences from short texts. The findings indicate that children with VIs exhibit a specific deficit in drawing inferences about spatial information in narratives as opposed to emotional or temporal information. The results are discussed in relation to the role of visual acuity in imagery skills and how this affects the construction of a mental model of a text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]