Text reading speed in a language with a shallow orthography benefits less from comprehension as reading ability matures

Why Are Causal and Temporal Connectives Difficult to Understand? A Comparison Between Italian Hearing Good and Poor Comprehenders and Deaf Poor Comprehenders

PURPOSE

Both hearing poor comprehenders (PCs) and deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) PCs have problems in understanding causal and temporal coherence relations signaled by connectives. The study examined whether hearing and DHH PCs' problems with connective understanding are similar and mainly related to their limited vocabulary, including knowledge of connective words, or to their poor reading comprehension abilities more generally.

METHOD

Three groups of 7- to 10-year-old readers, matched on grade level (hearing PCs, DHH PCs, and hearing good comprehenders [GCs]) performed a reading comprehension task, a vocabulary task, and causal and temporal connective understanding tasks. Hearing and DHH PCs were also matched on reading comprehension and decoding abilities.

RESULTS

The DHH PCs performed significantly worse than both the hearing GCs and PCs in temporal and causal connective understanding. Significant differences between hearing PCs and GCs were found only in causal connective understanding. DHH readers' difficulties in causal connective understanding were significantly associated with poorer vocabulary knowledge. In contrast, vocabulary knowledge did not uniquely contribute to hearing PCs' difficulties with causal connective understanding, once their reading comprehension skills were controlled for.

CONCLUSIONS

The results suggest that despite a similar reading profile, DHH PCs' difficulties with causal connective understanding are more closely related to their vocabulary delay, whereas hearing PCs' difficulties are more strongly influenced by their poor text integration processes (as indexed by their reading comprehension skills). Neither vocabulary knowledge nor reading comprehension skills contributed to the explanation of DHH readers and hearing PCs' temporal connective understanding.

Difficulties of Young Adults With Dyslexia in Reading and Writing Numbers

Letters and numbers are different domains, and their differentiation increases with schooling. It has nonetheless been argued that reading alphabetic and numerical materials partly involves the same processes, even in adults. Whether individuals with dyslexia have difficulty reading and writing numbers remains to be established. This study examined this issue in a group of 30 young adults with a diagnosis of dyslexia, without any concurrent specific difficulty in processing quantities, compared with a typically developing group matched for gender, age, university attended and course of studies, and approximate calculation ability. The results showed that adults with dyslexia also have severe difficulty in reading and writing numbers. It emerged that their number reading speed correlated moderately with word reading speed. We concluded that dyslexia is specifically related with difficulties in reading and writing not only alphabetic material but also numerical material. Our findings suggest that these abilities should be considered more carefully when assessing and supporting individuals with dyslexia.

What is text reading fluency and is it a predictor or an outcome of reading comprehension? A longitudinal investigation

Text reading fluency refers to the ability to read connected texts with accuracy, speed, and expression (prosody), and has garnered substantial attention as an important skill for reading comprehension. However, two fundamental questions remain-the dimensionality of text reading fluency including text reading efficiency (accuracy and speed) and reading prosody, and the directionality of the relation between text reading fluency and reading comprehension. These questions were addressed using longitudinal data from Grade 1 (M_age = 6.36 years) to Grade 3 (M_age = 8.34 years). Majority of children were White (approximately 60%) and African American (26%) with 39% to 52% from low-SES backgrounds, depending on the grade. Text reading fluency, word reading, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension were measured. Results from confirmatory factor analysis revealed that text reading fluency is a multidimensional construct with a trifactor structure, which has a general factor that captures common ability across text reading efficiency and reading prosody as well as local and specific factors that are unique beyond the general factor. However, the general factor was the most reliable factor, whereas local and specific factors were not reliable. The directionality of the relation between text reading fluency and reading comprehension was addressed by examining two competing structural equation models-text-reading-fluency-as-a-predictor/mediator model and text-reading-fluency-as-an-outcome model-and data supported the former. These results indicate that text reading fluency is a multidimensional construct, and it acts as a predictor, mediating the relations of word reading and listening comprehension to reading comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).