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This study aimed to examine (a) the developing interrelations between the efficiency of reading individually presented words (i.e., isolated word recognition speed) and the efficiency of reading multiword sequences (i.e., word list and text reading fluency); (b) whether serial digit naming, indexing the ability to process multi-item sequences, accounts for variance in word list and text reading fluency beyond isolated word recognition speed; and (c) if these patterns of relations/effects differ between two alphabetic languages varying in orthographic consistency (English and Greek). In total, 710 Greek- and English-speaking children from Grades 1, 3, and 5 completed a serial digit naming task and a set of reading tasks, including unconnected words presented individually, unconnected words presented in lists, and sentences forming a meaningful passage. Our results showed that the relation between isolated word recognition speed and both word list and text reading fluency gradually decreased across grades, irrespective of contextual processing requirements. Moreover, serial digit naming uniquely predicted both word-list and text reading fluency in Grades 3 and 5, beyond isolated word recognition speed. The same pattern of results was observed across languages. These findings challenge the notion that individual word recognition and reading fluency differ only in text-level processing requirements. Instead, an additional component of processing multi-item sequences appears to emerge by Grade 3, after a basic level of both accuracy and speed in word recognition has been achieved, offering a potential mechanism underlying the transition from dealing with words one at a time to efficient processing of word sequences.

Word list reading fluency is theoretically expected to depend on single word reading speed. Yet the correlation between the two diminishes with increasing fluency, while fluency remains strongly correlated to serial digit naming. We hypothesized that multi-element sequence processing is an important component of fluency. We used confirmatory factor analyses with serial and discrete naming tasks with matched items, including digits, dice, objects, number words, and words, performed by about 100 Greek children in each of Grades 1, 3, and 5. Separable serial and discrete factors emerged across grades, consistent with distinct skill dimensions. Loadings were greater for serial than discrete, suggesting that discrete processing does not fully determine serial processing. Average serial performance differed more than discrete between grades, consistent with improvement beyond single-item speed. Serial word reading aligned increasingly with the serial factor at higher grades. Thus, word reading fluency is gradually dominated by skill in simultaneously processing multiple successive items through different stages (termed "cascading"), beyond automatization of individual words.

After reviewing past efforts related to computer-based reading disability (RD) assessment, we present a fully automated screening battery that evaluates critical skills relevant for RD diagnosis designed for unsupervised application in the Greek educational system. Psychometric validation in 301 children, 8-10 years old (grades 3 and 4; including 288 from the general school population and 13 from a clinical sample), indicated that computer-based screening can detect children likely to be diagnosed with RD (with 80-86% correct classification), using a linear discriminant function derived from measures taken without supervision within a 30-minute "computer game" interaction. We conclude that automated screening solutions constitute a feasible option in the context of a shortage of expert personnel. (Contains 7 tables and 2 footnotes.)

Attempts to evaluate the cognitive-motivational profiles of students with reading comprehension difficulties have been scarce. The purpose of the present study was twofold: (a) to assess the discriminatory validity of cognitive, motivational, affective, and psychopathological variables for identification of students with reading difficulties, and (b) to profile students with and without reading comprehension difficulties across those variables. Participants were 87 students who scored more than 1.3 SD below the mean on a standardized reading comprehension battery and 500 typical students in grades 2 through 4. Results using linear discriminant analyses indicated that students with reading comprehension difficulties could be accurately predicted by low cognitive skills and high competitiveness. Using cluster analysis, students with significant deficits in reading comprehension were mostly assigned to a low skill/low motivation group (termed helpless) or a low skill/high motivation group (termed motivated low achievers). Based on these findings, it was concluded that motivation, emotions, and psychopathology play a pivotal role in explaining the achievement tendencies of students with reading comprehension difficulties. (Contains 5 figures, 5 tables and 3 notes.)

Although it is established that reading fluency is more strongly related to serial naming of symbols than to naming of isolated items ("serial superiority effect"), the reason for the difference remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of executive functions in explaining the serial superiority effect. One hundred seven Grade 6 Greek children were assessed on serial and discrete naming (digits, objects, and words), executive (inhibition, shifting, and updating) and non-executive tasks (simple choice reaction), and on a serial Rapid Alternating Stimuli task. Reading fluency correlated more strongly with serial naming than with discrete naming, consistent with the serial superiority effect. In hierarchical regression analyses, executive measures failed to account for variance shared between serial naming and reading fluency. In confirmatory factor analyses, including a discrete and a serial factor for the naming tasks, variance in the executive tasks not shared with simple choice reaction was not associated with the serial factor. Thus, the executive tasks failed to account for the serial superiority effect. The high correlation between the simple choice factor and the discrete naming factor suggests that method variance partially underlies the observed relationship between executive function tasks and word reading. We argue that the distinction between serial and discrete dimensions indicates that internally regulated cognitive control is crucial for the serial superiority in naming symbols and words.

Effects of lexical and sublexical variables on visual word recognition are often treated as homogeneous across participants and stable over time. In this study, we examine the modulation of frequency, length, syllable and bigram frequency, orthographic neighborhood, and graphophonemic consistency effects by (a) individual differences, and (b) item repetition. A group of 129 participants performed lexical decision and naming, in counterbalanced order, using a set of 150 Greek words in which these variables were decorrelated. Frequency, length, and syllable frequency effects were reduced by a preceding task. Length effects were inversely related to years of education. Neighborhood effects depended on the metric used. There were no significant effects or interactions of bigram frequency or consistency. The results suggest that exposure to a word causes transient effects that may cumulatively develop into permanent individual differences. Models of word recognition must incorporate item-specific learning to account for these findings.

The concept of Matthew effects in reading development refers to a longitudinally widening gap between high achievers and low achievers. Various statistical approaches have been proposed to examine this idea. However, little attention has been paid to psychometric issues of scaling. Specifically, interval-level data are required to compare performance differences across performance ranges, but only ordinal-level data are available with current literacy measures. To demonstrate the interpretability problems of contrasting growth slopes, we use data from a longitudinal study of literacy development. We explore the possibility of comparing across ages, matched for performance, and we examine the consequences of nonlinear growth, temporal lag estimates, and individual differences in developmental progression. We conclude that, although conceptually appealing, the widening gap prediction is not empirically testable.

Dyslexic difficulties in lexical stress were compared to difficulties in segmental phonology. Twenty-nine adolescents with dyslexia and 29 typically developing adolescents, matched on age and nonverbal ability, were assessed on reading, spelling, phonological and stress awareness, rapid naming, and short-term memory. Group differences in stress assignment were larger than in segmental phonology in reading and spelling pseudowords but not words, indicating a fragility of explicit processes that manipulate stress representations. Despite impaired stress performance in dyslexia at the group level, individual variability failed to reveal evidence for a stress-specific deficit or for a distinct stress-impaired subgroup.

In this study we propose a classification system for spelling errors and determine the most common spelling difficulties of Greek children with and without dyslexia. Spelling skills of 542 children from the general population and 44 children with dyslexia, Grades 3-4 and 7, were assessed with a dictated common word list and age-appropriate passages. Spelling errors were classified into broad categories, including phonological (graphophonemic mappings), grammatical (inflectional suffixes), orthographic (word stems), stress assignment (diacritic), and punctuation. Errors were further classified into specific subcategories. Relative proportions for a total of 11,364 errors were derived by calculating the opportunities for each error type. Nondyslexic children of both age groups made primarily grammatical and stress errors, followed by orthographic errors. Phonological and punctuation errors were negligible. Most frequent specific errors were in derivational affixes, stress diacritics, inflectional suffixes, and vowel historical spellings. Older children made fewer errors, especially in inflectional suffixes. Dyslexic children differed from nondyslexic ones in making more errors of the same types, in comparable relative proportions. Spelling profiles of dyslexic children did not differ from those of same-age children with poor reading skills or of younger children matched in reading and phonological awareness. In conclusion, spelling errors of both dyslexic and nondyslexic children indicate persistent difficulty with internalizing regularities of the Greek orthographic lexicon, including derivational, inflectional, and word (stem) families. This difficulty is greater for children with dyslexia.

The simple view of reading posits that reading comprehension can be decomposed into a print-specific component (concerning decoding and sight word reading) and a language comprehension component (concerning verbal and metalinguistic skills not related to print). One might properly consider lexical skills, indexed by vocabulary measures, part of the language component; however, vocabulary measures end up taking up substantial amounts of print-dependent reading comprehension variance, presumably because of the interrelations among semantic, orthographic, and phonological specification of lexical entries. In the present study we examined the role of vocabulary in the prediction of reading comprehension by testing alternative formulations within the context of the simple view. We used cross-sectional and (1-year) longitudinal data from 436 children in Grades 3-6 attending regular classrooms. We quantified the proportion of variance accounting for reading comprehension that could be attributed to vocabulary measures. We then tested a latent variable model positing a mediating position for vocabulary against a model with lexically based covariation among the simple view components. We discuss the results in an attempt to bring together the simple view with the lexical quality hypothesis for reading comprehension. (Contains 8 tables, 4 figures, and 1 footnote)

Rapid automatized naming (RAN) is strongly correlated with reading fluency. A substantial part of this correlation is ascribed to the serial nature of the task. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that the left-to-right and downward scanning direction of reading and RAN may partially underlie their relationship. 107 Grade 6 Greek children were assessed on RAN digits and objects, a reversed-direction version of RAN digits, and word- and passage-reading fluency. The correlations of regular RAN with reading were not larger than those of RAN backward, ruling out visual scanning as an explanation of the relation between RAN and reading.

The simple view of reading admits two components in accounting for individual differences in reading comprehension: a print-dependent component related to decoding and word identification, and a print-independent one related to oral language comprehension. It has been debated whether word or nonword reading is a better index of the print-dependent component and whether vocabulary measures fit within the print-independent component or constitute an additional factor. Here we apply a confirmatory factor analysis on a set of relevant measures from 488 Greek children in Grades 3-5 independently of reading comprehension. The results indicate that word and nonword reading do not constitute distinct factors but covary along the same two dimensions of accuracy and fluency. Oral vocabulary measures group with listening comprehension, resulting in excellent model fits. Strong correlations were observed between the latent factors of the purported print-dependent and print-independent components, consistent with an approach that focuses on the strong relations among semantic, orthographic, and phonological aspects of word representations. (Contains 3 tables and 4 figures.)

Assessment of lexical/semantic knowledge is performed with a variety of tests varying in response requirements. The present study exemplifies the application of modern statistical approaches in the adaptation and assessment of the psychometric properties of the "Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test--Revised" (PPVT-R) Greek. Confirmatory factor analyses applied to data from a large sample of elementary school students (N = 585) indicated the existence of a single vocabulary dimension and differential item functioning procedures pointed to minimal bias due to gender or ethnic group. Rasch model-derived indices of item difficulty and discrimination were used to develop a short form of the test, which was administered to a second sample of 900 students. Convergent and discriminant validity were assessed through comparisons with the "Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children"--III Vocabulary and Block design subtests. Short- and long-term stability of individual scores over a 6-month period were very high, and the utility of the test as part of routine educational assessment is attested by its strong longitudinal predictive value with reading comprehension measures. It is concluded that the Greek version of the PPVT-R constitutes a reliable and valid assessment of vocabulary for Greek students and immigrants who speak Greek. (Contains 4 tables and 6 figures.)

The presence of Matthew effects was tested in students of varying reading, spelling, and vocabulary skills. A cross-sequential design was implemented, following 587 Grade 2 through 4 students across five measurement points (waves) over 2 years. Students were administered standardized assessments of reading, spelling, and vocabulary. Results indicated that the hypothesized fan-spread pattern for Matthew effects was not evident. Low and high ability groups were formed based on 25th and 75th percentile cutoffs on initial measures of spelling, reading accuracy and fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Multilevel modeling suggested that low and high ability groups had significantly different starting points (intercepts) and their pattern of growth on passage comprehension did not indicate that the gap would increase over time. Instead, some analyses, especially of the youngest cohorts, showed significant convergence. However, there was no evidence of eventually closing the gap. Thus, although the poor students may not be getting poorer, they do not get sufficiently richer either. (Contains 3 tables and 5 figures.)

This study focuses on the shared variance between reading comprehension and word-level reading skills in a population of 534 Greek children in Grades 2 through 4. The correlations between measures of word and pseudoword accuracy and fluency, on the one hand, and vocabulary and comprehension skills, on the other, were sizeable and stable or increasing with grade. However, the unique contribution of word reading to comprehension became negligible after vocabulary measures were entered in hierarchical regression analyses, particularly for higher grades, suggesting that any effects of decoding on comprehension may be mediated by the lexicon, consistent with lexical quality hypothesis. Structural modeling with latent variables revealed an invariant path across grades in which vocabulary was defined by its covariation with reading accuracy and fluency and affected comprehension directly. It is argued that skilled word reading influences comprehension by strengthening lexical representations, at least when phonological decoding can be relatively effortless.

In this study, we examined the characteristics of reading disability (RD) in the seventh grade of the Greek educational system and the corresponding diagnostic practice. We presented a clinically administered assessment battery, composed of typically employed tasks, and a fully automated, computer-based assessment battery that evaluates some of the same constructs. In all, 261 children ages 12 to 14 were tested. The results of the traditional assessment indicated that RD concerns primarily slow reading and secondarily poor reading and spelling accuracy. This pattern was matched in the domains most attended to in expert student evaluation. Automatic (computer-based) screening for RD in the target age range matched expert judgment in validity and reliability in the absence of a full clinical evaluation. It is proposed that the educational needs of the middle and high school population in Greece will be best served by concentrating on reading and spelling performance--particularly fluency--employing widespread computer-based screening to partially make up for expert-personnel shortage.