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Longitudinal prediction of English and Spanish reading skills was examined in a sample of 249 Spanish-speaking English-language learners at 3 time points in kindergarten through Grade 1. Phonological awareness transferred from Spanish to English and was predictive of word-identification skills, as in previous studies. Other variables showing cross-linguistic transfer were letter and word knowledge, print concepts, and sentence memory. Expressive vocabulary tended to show language-specific relationships to later reading. Oral-language variables predicted reading comprehension more highly than word identification. Classification of good and poor readers in 1st grade was found to be comparable with studies that used monolingual readers. Results broadened the range of variables showing cross-linguistic transfer, at the level of both predictor and outcome variables.

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Concurrent relationships among measures of naming speed, phonological awareness, orthographic skill, and other reading subskills were explored in a representative sample of second graders. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that naming speed, as measured by the the rapid automatized naming (RAN) task, accounted for a sizable amount of unique variance in reading with vocabulary and phonemic awareness partialled out. The unique contribution of naming speed to reading was relatively stronger for orthographic skills, whereas the contribution of phonemic skills was stronger for nonword decoding. In further analyses, marked difficulties on a range of reading tasks, including orthographic processing, were seen in a subgroup with a double deficit (slow naming speed and low phonemic awareness) but not in groups with only a single deficit. These findings are broadly consistent with Bowers and Wolf's (1993a, 1993b; Wolf & Bowers, 1999) double-deficit hypothesis of reading disability.

We evaluated signal-noise discrimination in children with and without dyslexia, using magnocellular and parvocellular visual stimuli presented either with or without high noise. Dyslexic children had elevated contrast thresholds when stimuli of either type were presented in high noise, but performed as well as non-dyslexic children when either type was displayed without noise. Our findings suggest that deficits in noise exclusion, not magnocellular processing, contribute to the etiology of dyslexia.

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Development of English-and Spanish-reading skills was explored in a sample of 251 Spanishspeaking English-language learners from kindergarten through Grade 2. Word identification and reading comprehension developed at a normal rate based on monolingual norms for Spanishand English-speaking children, but English oral language lagged significantly behind. Four categories of predictor variables were obtained in Spanish in kindergarten and in English in first grade: print knowledge, expressive language (as measured by vocabulary and sentence repetition tasks), phonological awareness, and rapid automatic naming (RAN). Longitudinal regression analyses indicated a modest amount of cross-language transfer from Spanish to English. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that developing English-language skills (particularly phonological awareness and RAN) mediated the contribution of Spanish-language variables to later reading. Further analyses revealed stronger within-than cross-language associations of expressive language with later reading, suggesting that some variables function cross-linguistically, and others within a particular language. Results suggest that some of the cognitive factors underlying reading disabilities in monolingual children (e.g., phonological awareness and RAN) may be important to an understanding of reading difficulties in bilingual children.