Understanding poor comprehenders in different orthographies: Universal versus language-specific skills

Despite an emerging focus on poor comprehenders in recent reading research, a number of unresolved issues concerning the cognitive and linguistic underpinnings of this disorder remain. In this special issue, we bring together a set of six papers examining the strengths and weaknesses of different types of poor comprehenders across multiple languages, including English, French and Chinese. Key findings of these studies show that certain oral language skills, such as morphological awareness and syntactic awareness, are related to reading comprehension deficits in different languages, suggesting their universality. Intriguingly, dissociability and co-occurrence of reading comprehension difficulties have been identified in bilingual children whose L1 and L2 are quite disparate, with some bilinguals exhibiting reading comprehension deficits in a single language, while others display these deficits in both languages. These issues and their implications for future research are further discussed.