We used structural equation modeling to investigate sources of individual differences in oral reading fluency in a transparent orthography, Russian. Phonological processing, orthographic processing, and rapid automatized naming were used as independent variables, each derived from a combination of two scores: phonological awareness and pseudoword repetition, spelling and orthographic choice, and rapid serial naming of letters and digits, respectively. The contribution of these to oral text-reading fluency was evaluated as a direct relationship and via two mediators, decoding accuracy and unitized reading, measured with a single-word oral reading test. The participants were "good" and "poor" readers, i.e., those with reading skills above the 90 th and below the 10 th percentiles (n = 1,344, grades 2-6, St. Petersburg, Russia). In both groups, orthographic processing skills significantly contributed to fluency and unitized reading, but not to decoding accuracy. Phonological processing skills did not contribute directly to reading fluency in either group, while contributing to decoding accuracy and, to a lesser extent, to unitized reading. With respect to the roles of decoding accuracy and unitized reading, the results for good and poor readers diverged: in good readers, unitized reading, but not decoding accuracy, was significantly related to reading fluency. For poor readers, decoding accuracy (measured as pseudoword decoding) was related to reading fluency, but unitized reading was not. These results underscore the importance of orthographic skills for reading fluency even in an orthography with consistent phonology-to-orthography correspondences. They also point to a qualitative difference in the reading strategies of good and poor readers.

Abstract. The paper deals with micro-and macrostructural static and dynamic narrative characteristics in specifically language-impaired (SLI) Russian-speaking preschool children and their typically-developing (TD) peers. The study was based on experimental data that included storytelling and retelling elicited by means of wordless picture sequences. First, individual measures of story structure, episode completeness, internal state terms, story productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity, as well as the percentage of linguistic dysfluencies and errors, were evaluated and compared between the experimental and control groups. Second, the impact of such factors as session (1st vs. 2nd), story complexity, and mode (telling vs. retelling) on the dynamic variation of micro-and macrostructural narrative measures was evaluated. Our results highlighted essential dynamic differences between the samples from the perspective of narrative structure, structural complexity, grammaticality, and vocabulary.*

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Here we investigated the psychological texture of a literacy-related disability, specific reading disability (SRD, also referred to as dyslexia), as it is manifested in Russian and defined in the Russian Federation. Specifically, we attempted to understand the emerging properties of this deficit among 96 students in grades 2 and 3 (38 girls and 58 boys, aged 7.90–10.42 years, mean = 8.87, SD = 0.56) attending a public primary school in St. Petersburg, Russia. Based on the linguistic properties of the Russian language, we designed a literacy-skills assessment battery that incorporates both internationally common (i.e., the traditional IQ-achievement discrepancy-based) and Russia-specific (i.e., typology-based) approaches to identifying reading difficulties in emergent readers. In addition, we measured children’s levels of general intelligence, inattention, and hyperactivity (i.e., the symptomatology related to attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders, ADHD). Multi-trait-multi-method methodology was employed in that data were collected both from teachers and students for multiple reading-related processes, using both self-report and maximum performance assessments. The results are interpreted in terms of the convergence (and lack of such) between the common and country/language-specific approaches to the identification of reading difficulties, and the relevance of the general level of intelligence to diagnosing specific reading difficulties in Russian and in Russia.

The signal properties of polycrystalline mercuric iodide (HgI 2 ) film detectors, under irradiation conditions relevant to mammographic, radiographic, fluoroscopic and radiotherapy x-ray imaging, are reported. Each film detector consists of an ∼230 to ∼460 µm thick layer of HgI 2 (fabricated through physical vapour deposition or a screen-print process) and a thin barrier layer, sandwiched between a pair of opposing electrode plates. The high atomic number, high density and low effective ionization energy, W EFF , of HgI 2 make it an attractive candidate for significantly improving the performance of active matrix, flat-panel imagers (AMFPIs) for several x-ray imaging applications. The temporal behaviour of current from the film detectors in the presence and in the absence of radiation was used to examine dark current levels, the lag and reciprocity of the signal response, x-ray sensitivity and W EFF . The results are discussed in the context of present AMFPI performance. This study provides performance data for a wide range of potential medical x-ray imaging applications from a single set of detectors and represents the first investigation of the signal properties of polycrystalline mercuric iodide for the radiotherapy application.Z Su et al