Our research focuses on the skills that children and adults need to achieve full literacy.
Reading is the foundational skill through which people acquire knowledge and engage with society. Adults must be able to understand what they read to make informed decisions about their health and their family’s well-being—especially in critical situations like managing illnesses or following prescription instructions. In the workplace, both safety and success depend on the ability to follow written procedures and engage in ongoing, high-level learning. Skill in reading is key to full participation in all major institutions in society: government, education, and the economy. It is vital to uncover how to set all children on pathways towards strong reading. This is the long-term objective of our research.
Learn more about our ongoing studies!
Our past and current research investigates a number of factors.
Learning New Words
We are interested in understanding how skilled children are at learning the spellings and meanings of new words that they encounter in independent reading (e.g., Deacon, Mimeau, Chung, & Chen, 2019). We want to find out how children use this acquired knowledge to support their learning of other words and their word reading overall (e.g., Deacon, Pasquarella, Marinus, Tims, & Castles, 2019). This work will tell us more about the power of children’s independent learning!
Sentence Comprehension
The sentences children encounter when reading texts are far more complex than those they encounter in everyday conversation. We are interested in how the basic sentences children encounter in both written and oral language, and the difficult sentences they encounter mostly in written language, impact their reading comprehension (e.g., Sorenson Duncan, Mimeau, Crowell, & Deacon, 2020). This research can help us better understand which sentence types support children’s reading comprehension.
Morphological Skills
Morphology is the study of words. Morphological awareness refers to children’s awareness of the smallest units of meaning in language, such as roots, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphemes are the smallest unit of meaning (e.g., “girl,” plural “-s,” or past tense “- ed”). Such morphological skills are what allow children to use these building blocks effectively in written and oral language. We investigate how morphological skills are connected to children’s literacy skills, including word reading (e.g., Robertson, & Deacon, 2019), spelling (e.g., Breadmore, & Deacon, 2019), and reading comprehension (e.g., Oliveira, Levesque, Deacon, & da Mota, 2020). We are also interested in the frameworks that highlight the mechanisms behind these connections (e.g., Levesque, Breadmore, & Deacon, 2020).
Prosodic Sensitivity
Prosody is the rhythmic patterning of speech. We are interested in whether prosodic skills independently contribute to the development of children’s literacy skills (like word reading, text reading accuracy, and reading comprehension) (e.g., Deacon, Holliman, Dobson, & Harrison, 2018). We also examine whether these relationships differ at the outset of reading development and when children are in the midst of it (e.g., Critten, Holliman, Hughes, Wood, Cunnane, Pillinger, & Deacon, 2020).
Students with a History of Reading Difficulties
University students are expected to maintain a high-level of reading ability, however, there is a lack of understanding regarding how students with a history of reading difficulties approach the demanding literacy tasks that face them. Our research looks at how the literacy skills, study strategies, and academic achievement of these students differs from those without a history of reading difficulties (e.g., Bergey, Parrila, Laroche, & Deacon, 2019; MacKay, Laroche, Parrila, & Deacon, 2019). We hope to use this research to further develop an evidence-based approach to identifying and supporting academically at-risk.
Second Language Acquisition
As more and more children throughout the world become second language learners (be that through immersion programs, immigration, etc.), researchers are increasingly interested in how the skills a child has acquired in their first language influences their learning of a second. We have investigated whether children with a variety of first language backgrounds use their morphological awareness to aid in their French reading comprehension (Lam, Chen, & Deacon, 2019). Furthermore, with help from our international collaborators, we have considered whether first language Cantonese lexical tone awareness is associated with second language English vocabulary knowledge (Choi, Deacon, & Tong, 2019).