Topic
Reading research, explained
19 open-access reading studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- What early skills predict reading in kids at risk of dyslexia?
Children's broad spoken-language skills at age 3-4 predicted how well they later learned letter sounds and phonemes, how well they read words, and how well they understood text years later.
- Is dyslexia caused by a single deficit or multiple risk factors?
Dyslexia is best explained by a combination of multiple independent language, sensory, and decision-making factors rather than a single core deficit.
- How does phonics versus whole-word teaching change the brain?
Teaching methods that connect print to sound strengthen the brain's phonological pathways, while teaching methods that connect print directly to meaning engage semantic areas.
- Does mental flexibility help children learn to read?
Children who can mentally group written words by both sound and meaning simultaneously show stronger reading comprehension and word recognition skills.
- Do deaf readers need sound-based skills to read well?
Deaf readers reached similar reading levels by different routes: oral deaf readers relied on English sound knowledge, while deaf native signers relied more on meaning-based memory.
- How spoken dialect affects learning to read Standard Arabic.
Children understand the sounds and structures of their spoken Arabic dialect better than those of Standard Arabic, which directly helps them learn to read Standard Arabic.
- Does early awareness of word parts predict how kids read?
Young Greek children's awareness of how words are built from meaningful parts predicted how well they understood what they read two years later, but not how fast they read words.
- Does reading speed still matter for school grades after primary school?
How quickly and accurately children read aloud predicted their grades in text-heavy subjects even after accounting for how well they understood what they read, though the extra contribution was small.
- Do kids with dyslexia or ADHD have visual processing problems?
Children with reading disorder struggled specifically with remembering the order of visual shapes, not with seeing or remembering single shapes, and this order memory modestly predicted reading skill.
- Do music skills help children learn to read and spell?
A child's ability to reproduce rhythms and perceive pitch is closely linked to their awareness of language sounds and their spelling skills, but music skills do not directly predict reading comprehension once language-sound awareness is accounted for.
- Do parents' learning difficulties and home activities shape skills?
Parents' own reading and maths difficulties predicted their children's school skills directly, not by changing how much parents read with or taught their children at home.
- Do children with reading comprehension difficulties struggle academically?
Children with poor reading comprehension but good decoding skills show lower educational attainment in primary school and are less likely than their peers to meet key academic benchmarks by the end of compulsory education.
- Do silent readers 'hear' stress and rhythm in their heads?
Readers slowed down on an ambiguous word when the story context demanded stressing it but the rhythm of the sentence made stress awkward, suggesting we build an inner prosody while reading silently.
- Do word skills and reading comprehension help each other in Chinese?
Chinese children's ability to understand word structures and their reading comprehension skills mutually boost each other over time.
- Why do children with dyslexia struggle to learn similar-sounding words?
Children with reading disability had particular trouble telling apart newly learned words that started the same way, and children who also had a language disorder struggled even with dissimilar words and remembered less the next day.
- Do poor readers retrieve words from memory in the same way?
People with weak vocabularies were less accurate at linking a verb back to its subject, but they retrieved the subject just as fast and by the same direct-access route as stronger readers.
- Do weaker teen readers use rhythm and pitch less clearly in speech?
Teenagers who decode words well but understand text poorly lengthened words at phrase boundaries less than good comprehenders when copying spoken sentences, suggesting weaker use of prosody to mark sentence structure.
- Does the Simple View of Reading fit teens with intellectual disability?
For teenagers with intellectual disability, understanding what they read depended not just on decoding words and understanding speech, but directly on vocabulary and working memory too.
- What makes skilled adult readers good at comprehension?
In adult readers of Portuguese, understanding spoken language, vocabulary and awareness of word parts predicted reading comprehension, while basic word-decoding accuracy mattered only indirectly.