Significant difficulties in reading comprehension, despite attendance of compulsory schooling, are a worldwide phenomenon. While previous research on adults with low literacy skills focused primarily on their reading ability, less is known about their oral language skills. In this , we present an investigation of the listening comprehension skills of a selected group of German-speaking young adults, whose reading comprehension is at a primary school level ( = 32, ages 16 to 19 years).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe relations between socioeconomic status (SES) and language skills at the onset of reading acquisition has not received much attention in research. In this study, a standardized battery of oral and written language tests was administered to 127 Arabic-speaking children at the end of first grade. SES-related differences were found in a line of oral language measures (vocabulary, syntax, morphology, and listening comprehension), but not in phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN), nor in any of the reading components (decoding, word reading, reading comprehension and orthographic knowledge).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study set out to examine the effects of a morpheme-based training on reading and spelling in fifth and sixth graders ( = 47), who present poor literacy skills and speak German as a second language. A computerized training, consisting of a visual lexical decision task (comprising 2,880 items, presented in 12 sessions), was designed to encourage fast morphological analysis in word processing. The children were divided between two groups: the one underwent a morpheme-based training, in which word-stems of inflections and derivations were presented for a limited duration, while their pre- and suffixes remained on screen until response.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThree groups of reading-disabled children were found in studies of English, German, and French: a group with a double deficit in reading and spelling, a group with a single spelling deficit, and a more rarely reported group presenting a single reading deficit. This study set out to examine whether these groups can be found in adults, readers and spellers of Hebrew, which differs from the previously studied orthographies in many aspects. To this end, Hebrew-speaking adults with or without reading disability were administered various literacy and literacy-related tests.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe attainment of fluency in reading is a major difficulty for reading-disabled people. Manipulations applied on the presentation of texts, leading to "on-line" effects on reading (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRegular readers were found to adjust the routine of reading to the demands of processing imposed by different orthographies. Dyslexic readers may lack such adaptability in reading. This hypothesis was tested among readers of Hebrew, as Hebrew has two forms of script differing in phonological transparency.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpelling-sound transparency varies across orthographies. This aspect was found to have implications for the strategy of reading, but whether reading of different orthographies also relies differently on cognitive skills is yet unclear. This question was examined mainly by cross-participant-and-language investigations in which orthographic variation is hard to isolate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOrthographies vary in the degree of transparency of spelling-sound correspondence. These range from shallow orthographies with transparent grapheme-phoneme relations, to deep orthographies, in which these relations are opaque. Only a few studies have examined whether orthographic depth is reflected in brain activity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOrthographies range from shallow orthographies with transparent grapheme-phoneme relations, to deep orthographies, in which these relations are opaque. Two forms of script transcribe the Hebrew language: the shallow pointed script (with diacritics) and the deep unpointed script (without diacritics). This study was set out to examine whether the reading of these scripts evokes distinct brain activity.
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