The present study investigated the relationships between orthographic learning and other aspects of reading (phonological and orthographic decoding and comprehension) in Swedish children (age 7–9yrs). Cognitive correlates of orthographic learning were also studied, as well as the cognitive predictors of decoding skill and reading comprehension. The results indicated that orthographic learning was related to all the other aspects of reading. Orthographic learning and decoding skills were both related to phonological and visuospatial working memory. Reading comprehension was associated with phonological- and general working memory. The findings are discussed with reference to the component model of working memory.

This report summarizes some of the results of studies in our laboratory exploring the development of cognitive, reading and prosodic skills in children with cochlear implantation (CI). The children with CI performed at significantly lower levels than the hearing comparison group on the majority of cognitive tests, despite showing levels of nonverbal ability. The differences between children with CI and hearing children were most pronounced on tasks with relatively high phonological processing demands, but they were not limited to phonological processing. Impairment of receptive and productive prosody was also evident in children with CI. Despite these difficulties, 75% of the children with CI reached a level of reading skill comparable to that of hearing children. The results are discussed with respect to compensation strategies in reading.

and profound hearing impairment treated by cochlear implants (CI). In this study we explore this relationship in sixteen Swedish children with CI. We found that over 60% of the children with CI performed at the level of their hearing peers in a reading comprehension test. Demographic factors were not predictive of reading comprehension, but a complex working memory task was. Reading percentile was significantly correlated to the working memory test, but no other correlations between reading and cognitive/linguistic factors remained significant after age was factored out. Individual results from a comparison of the two best and the two poorest readers corroborate group results, confirming the important role of working memory for reading as measured by comprehension of words and sentences in this group of children.

The present study investigated WM capacity, lexical access, phonological skills and reading ability in 6 children with cochlear implants (CI), attending grades 1-3. For each test measure, the individual performance of the children with CI was compared to a grade-matched comparison group of children with normal hearing. Performance was also studied in relation to demographic factors. The results reveal that the children with CI have specific difficulties in tasks of phonological skills and phonological working memory (WM) where nonwords are used as test stimuli. They do not seem to have problems with phonological processing of words for which they have a well defined phonological representation. They also experienced relatively more difficulties in tasks on lexical access without any contextual info. We suggest that children with CI are particularly efficient in using compensatory strategies in situations where their auditory perception does not provide sufficient information to correctly match the incoming speech signal to a corresponding representation in the long-term phonological storage. The children with CI in this study are skilled readers, both for decoding of words and nonwords and for reading comprehension. They may use both orthographic and phonological reading strategies although most of them seem to be dependent on phonological decoding to some extent.