We are grateful to the children who participated in this study as well as to their parents, teachers, and principals for their support. We would also like to thank Ekaterina Reymarova, Laura Aziz, and Hannah Robinson for their help with testing and data scoring and entry.

The sentences in texts are far more complex and diverse than those that children commonly encounter in oral language. This raises interesting questions as to whether the understanding of some sentence types might be more important than others in children's reading comprehension. Accordingly, we examined the relation between children's reading comprehension and their understanding of two types of sentences: one we label as basic sentences, which are common in both oral and written language, and the other we label as difficult sentences, which are more restricted to written language. One hundred and four English-speaking students (mean age = 10.8 years) completed an experimental measure of oral sentence comprehension capturing these two sentence types, a standardized measure of reading comprehension, as well as control measures for word reading, phonological awareness, vocabulary and working memory. After accounting for the variance explained by the control measures, hierarchical linear regression analyses revealed that comprehension of basic sentences, but not of difficult sentences, was significantly related to children's reading comprehension.These results demonstrate that, at least in the fifth grade, English-speaking children use their understanding of those sentences for which they have gained a strong foundation through oral language (i.e., basic sentences) to springboard into reading for understanding.

semantic representations. According to this theoretical approach, dyslexics' impairments in phonological decoding lead to reliance on the lexical route. More recent conceptualizations of dual-route models suggest that the use of morphological information speeds lexical access, with both direct and indirect lexical access via letter co-occurrences, such as complex graphemes and morphemes (e.g., TH, CH and RE, ED, respectively;Grainger & Ziegler, 2011). This provides a theoretical context for the speculation that dyslexics might rely on a lexical route that includes morphemes.Nonetheless, Betjemann and Keenan ( 2008) argued against the notion that semantic processing is a strength in dyslexia, an idea that can be applied equally to morphological processing. The authors explained that dyslexic children rely on semantic cues more than typical readers because they need to compensate for their poor phonological skills when trying to read, rather than because they have particularly strong semantic skills. Like Stanovich's (1980) interactive-compensatory model, Betjemann and Keenan (2008) incorporate the paradoxical hypotheses that dyslexics have impaired morphological and semantic processing, and yet rely greatly on these while reading. Together, these approaches provide theoretical justification for the possibility that dyslexics' established phonological deficits might be associated with relative strengths in morphological and/or semantic processing.

Objective Our objective was to examine the role of semantics in the relation between syntactic awareness and contextual facilitation in word reading. Methods Grade 3 children (N = 77) completed a syntactic awareness task in which we manipulated the possible reliance on semantic information. They also completed a task of word reading in isolation and in context from which we calculated a score of contextual facilitation. Results We found an association between children's performance in the syntactic awareness task and contextual facilitation in word reading. Importantly, however, we found an association only when children could rely on semantic information in the syntactic awareness task and not when the semantic information was limited. Conclusions These findings suggest that syntactic awareness acts together with semantics to foster the use of context in word reading, which has important implications for theories of reading development.